Informatics Competencies for Nurses Revisited

摘要

In my last column (Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 303–304), I told you about my participation in the 13th International Congress in Nursing Informatics. Each of these conferences is followed by an invitational postconference, which this year took place over three days in the lovely town of Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. The 34 participants, including three students, represented academia, practice, and administration in the countries of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Great Britain, Ireland, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States. Our charge for the postconference was to examine current and future expectations of informatics competencies for entry into practice for advanced practice nursing. The term entry into practice was used, as differing levels of education are required to enter nursing across the globe. In preparation, each participant was asked to write a chapter that would help guide our conversations. We were divided into five groups (educators, leaders, specialists, new frontiers, and eHealth) and instructed to generate a list of expected competencies to be presented to the entire group. The final product will be a publication targeted for the end of the year. To be able to project informatics competencies for this next generation of nurses, we started by revisiting a book published by the National League for Nursing (NLN): Preparing Nurses for Using Information Systems: Recommended Informatics Competencies (Peterson & Gerdin-Jelger, 1988). This book represented the work of the International Medical Informatics Association’s Nursing Informatics Task Force on Education, an international group that included representatives from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It delineates competences across three levels (user, is able to use the tool; developer, has knowledge to participate in tool development; and expert, directs development and implementation as consultant, evaluator, or researcher) for the practicing nurse, the nurse educator, the nurse leader, and the nurse researcher. As an elder in the field and coauthor with Dr. Judith Ronald of a chapter in the 1988 book, I was asked to write the opening chapter for the 2016 postconference and talk about “Looking Back to Move Forward” (which I relabeled “From Automation to Connected Care”). Our 1988 chapter, “Computer Education for Nurses: Curriculum Issues and Guidelines,” was based on a monograph Dr. Ronald and I did in 1987 for the NLN (Ronald & Skiba, 1987). The monograph, Guidelines for Basic Computer Education in Nursing, was widely used by educators in various countries to incorporate nursing informatics into the curriculum. As you can see, the United States in the old days called it computer education. We adopted the European term nursing informatics in the late 1980s. A LOOK AT THE PAST It was fascinating to revisit informatics competencies and available technologies from the past 40 years plus. My first exposure to informatics competencies was a book (Anderson, Gremy, & Pages, 1974) published by the International Federation for Information Processing. This book also had three categories of learners: all health care professionals, professionals who work with data-processing experts, and professionals trained in computing and data processing. Understanding hardware and software, having the skills needed to operate a computer, and knowing the techniques/methods of using a computer for various health-related functions formed the basis of the generic competencies for all health care professionals. The 1988 group built upon these generic competencies (Peterson & Gerdin-Jelger, 1988; see Table 1). Their focus for the practicing nurse was data processing, information seeking, and using documentation systems. Administrative competencies expanded to directing the organization of data for various purposes as well as communication and ethical standa