Nursing patients back to ehealth: Deborah Cerasa

Visit hospital and you won’t just meet doctors and nurses during your stay. Drop by your GP for a flu jab, and chances are a practice nurse will do the jabbing. The same story is repeated in other examples such as early childhood checks and caregiving for the elderly.

Nursing is the backbone of Australia’s healthcare system, a statement backed by some impressive statistics. The total nursing population increased 11.8 percent between 2004 and 2008, bringing the total number of nurses to 272,741, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) reports.

Representing thousands of these professionals is the Royal College of Nursing, one of Australia’s peak bodies for the nursing industry. Its vision is to inspire, progress and promote the profession of nursing. And embracing the use of new technology is one of the key planks of this vision.

Royal College of Nursing chief executive Deborah Cerasa said technology isn’t going to go away, so the profession should not be nervous but keep finding ways to embrace what it offers.

“If we work with the new technologies, the outcomes for patients can only be better,” Ms Cerasa said.

One of the trickiest aspects of embracing ehealth is defining exactly what the term means, Ms Cerasa notes. It could be anything from tablet computers used on the ward through to electronic medical records, and the use of social media - such as Twitter and LinkedIn - by medical professionals to communicate with one another.

“From my perspective, using things like social media to connect professionals, and the robust movement of information throughout the profession is something I feel privileged to witness,” she said.

Ms Cerasa has practiced nursing for over 40 years, as a nurse on the ward, an intensive care nurse, and a midwife with her own midwifery practice. She told ehealthspace.org there will always be fear-mongering around the introduction of new technologies, but it’s easy to address.

The first step is remembering the patient comes first, and professional standards must always be the benchmark for nurse’s behaviour. She draws the analogy of some nurses who 30 years ago would go to the pub and gossip about patients. The same scenario was repeated with the introduction of ubiquitous email in the 1990s, and today’s use of social media.

“The reality is that it doesn’t matter which technology you are dealing with,” she said. “The most important thing is the guiding principles for using those technologies.”

The second step is ensuring nurses have adequate training in new technologies, something younger nurses have in spades. “I remember when I worked in intensive care, we had all the machines going ‘ping!’ Now if I went back into intensive care, the guiding principles of care would be the same, but I would probably need a refresher course in using the new technology that has come on ward since my time there,” she said.

Ultimately, ehealth technologies - regardless of how they are defined – will lead to better outcomes for patients, said Ms Cerasa.

“Anything that improves care, from the quality of care through to the timeliness of that care, has to be a good thing,” she said.

In addition, Ms Cerasa said ehealth helps give health consumers more power through the use of personally controlled electronic medical records, and access to better information.