By Elaine Francis, RGN | Published 5/21/2019
Digital tools in my job
I work as a nurse in elderly care homes. Elderly home is a facility home that gives services of daily life to old people who are not anymore capable of living alone their own homes. They provide personal and medical care for seniors. In these units seniors are provided by hygienic and medical care and food service and house keeping with- out being worried of these duties. The residents have their own private space or room of living and the support of mental wellbeing. They are not alone they meet daily people same age, have chance to talk and enjoy each other’s company. Nurses play strong role in care homes. We nurses look after the physical and mental health of the residents and administer their medicines. We initiate the care plane, provide medical procedure and treatment. Take laboratory tests such as blood test, urine test if needed, communicate with their families and the doctors, and monitor their health.
Technology and digitalization play a big role in nursing practice it provides new and innovation ways to learn and practice important skills for example in virtual reality, stimulations and online learning. Virtual reality plays important role in nursing educations. They stimulate the virtual patients and learn the care process and interact nursing interventions. The nursing students learn how to act in an emergency and in different care situations. We have a lot of online digital learning platforms and these platforms give us access to rich sources of education and get the skills needed constantly in the field of nursing. Artificial intelligence is also another technology that is used in nursing education it can simulate patient or create predictive models for the patients. interactions
We have various electronic health records where we record patients’ health information. Such as Effica, Hilka, Doma care, Life care, Pegasus. Every home care uses face book and Instagram to show the world how success full they are and how good is the level of care in those units. It also works as an advertiser tool for the units.
We use messaging to contact patients’ relatives or sometimes our doctors. We make meeting on line in Meets or Skype or google Meet. All the doctor diagnosis and lab results and medicine prescriptions of every one can be seen in Oma Kanta in Finland where every individual can access through banking authentication system. It is safe and protected. For ordering the medicines needed in unit we use Easy Medi platform.
Self-evaluation:
Every year almost in field of my work coming new digital platforms and already in the last few years I had the chance to learn few of them. I am quiet interested to learn always the new platforms but my biggest challenge and barrier is the language. Not being so confident about my Finnish language level makes it harder to learn new digital programs for me. I use social media daily in my life mostly to contact my family and friends who live in Iran and to read new posts and news. I don’t personally like to put every day of my life in face book! But I have an account and I mostly read other peoples posts there.
Technology has a lot of impact in nursing and I daily use a lot of different digital platforms for recording patients’ data and receiving patient’s health results and so on. I believe technology has positive affects such as improving data collection and accuracy and sufficiency in documentation and it enhance communication among health care workers it also improves patient’s safety and medication administration. But it also has some negative aspects for example the personal contact emotionally and physically is much less than before between a nurse and the patient. We can sit in another room and monitor their health data such as oxygen saturation heart rate, heart monitor, and so on. Also, there is potential for data breaches and privacy concerns. Technical issues and system failures are sometimes possible. Also, the cost and expenses of such monitoring are high. Relying too much on technology affects nurses critical thinking and decision making.