I work as a nurse in the emergency department at a local facility in the North Savo wellbeing area, and I do not use any social media tools to my advantage in patient work. However, we do have our own Instagram page for the emergency department, which is updated infrequently. Its purpose is mainly to be somewhat fun. Sure, for communication among ourselves, we have tools like Microsoft Teams, and of course, we also use email and a large number of sector-specific information and ordering channels. However, I feel that in today’s world, there are many more opportunities for enhancing collaboration, especially to facilitate daily work and communication.
For example, social media channels could be utilized to a great extent in patient education and guidance. However, what is urgently needed to facilitate nursing work is some kind of server that communicates in multiple directions about the patient’s condition, such that, for instance, the attending physician would receive a notification immediately when there is a significant change in the patient’s situation or when lab results are ready. Currently, all of this activity involves the nurse calling the doctor, who then can check the patient’s lab results on their computer.
But I believe that since patients will certainly be required to engage in significantly more self-care and self-guidance in the future, some kind of channels for TikTok-style short videos would be more than necessary. Furthermore, I believe that the assessment of the need for care should be improved even within the services of the welfare area so that it would be as easy as possible to get in touch, but also to send images, videos, and, for example, audio through that channel would be quick, effortless, and above all, possible. At that time, assessing the patient’s need for treatment would be easier, faster, and also more economical, as this method could help avoid emergency visits, since the matter could be better clarified using images and videos.
Additionally, for example, more could be done to train existing caregivers using platforms similar to YouTube, where videos could be freely accessed at any time and easily repeated. Certainly, there are many different platforms available where educational materials can be found, but the problem lies in the numerous servers, the scattered nature of the information, and also the amount of unnecessary information. A nurse working on a psychiatric ward does not need all the same information as, for example, a nurse working in a gastro-surgery department.
I hope that in the future, artificial intelligence, such as Chat GPT, could serve as a useful additional tool in patient care in some way. I just haven’t quite figured out a reasonable application for it yet, as I am still learning how to use AI myself. Additionally, AI could assist, for example, in helping patients understand and interpret lab results and provide treatment guidelines.
I also have a secret wish. On the acute care side, for example in emergency medicine, there are already some podcasts available, but I haven’t come across any podcasts about inpatient care yet. I hope that at some point we could make such a podcast available to make the world of inpatient care more visible and to highlight the challenges faced while working in that environment. Because the truth is that while anything can be said about the world of healthcare, caring for people in some way is one of the best professions in the world, although it is certainly also one of the most challenging professions.
The more one thinks about these issues, the more one realizes that there could be a real digital leap in the healthcare sector into the 2020s. Of course, there are still many challenges to address, such as issues related to data security and patient safety. However, we have the wonderful situation that a steady influx of new young staff is entering the healthcare field, who have lived their entire lives in the era of computers, smartphones, and social media. For them, using artificial intelligence or computers is not a problem; they are adaptable and additionally very innovative and clever.
What did this work teach me?
At first, it seemed to me that I didn’t have much to contribute to this task, that there weren’t really any digital tools used in the healthcare sector, and that it wouldn’t be realistic to adopt them in the future either. But I quickly realized that I was wrong, surprisingly. The healthcare sector is still very hierarchical, conservative, and a large ship that is turning very slowly. While the healthcare sector is struggling with issues, particularly due to employee and resource shortages, the world is developing numerous tools that could help ease work processes, as well as improve patient contact, for example, in communication with municipal healthcare services. In a way, I hope that in the future things can be managed more easily, quickly, and flexibly, and of course, significantly more cheaply in terms of cost as well.