Nursing leadership in the digital age: Navigating the complexities of healthcare technology

On International Nurses Day 2023, Dr Phalakshi Manjrekar, Director-Nursing, P. D. Hinduja Hospital & MRC, Mahim emphasises that Nurses are extremely quick learners and have an enormous ability to adapt to the digitally changing advances used in patient care devices and assessment tools. This is due to a strong base in the Foundation of Nursing in India, where nursing as a culture has always stressed discipline and a positive attitude

Advances in health care are rapidly progressing. Nurses do share the difficulties they face while working in clinical settings immediately after graduation. The epitome of this challenge is the technology gap between nursing education and the practise sector. The principle of nursing Leadership in the digital age today is preparedness. This needs investing in digital nursing, the hurdle then is the cost. Hospital Information System- HIS is the need of the hour and is commonly found in all healthcare institutes. We have yet to see the advent of the Nursing Information System- NIS in its totality being implemented to ease the challenges of nursing practice.

Having a strong and sturdy Information Technology department is instrumental in bridging the training and practice deficits in nursing today. This needs to be continuous and refreshed on a timely basis. Nurses are extremely quick learners and have an enormous ability to adapt to the digitally changing advances used in patient care devices and assessment tools. This is due to a strong base in the Foundation of Nursing in India, where nursing as a culture has always stressed discipline and a positive attitude.

As digitisation progresses, leading the way to paperless documentation, the challenge of an ethical and legally acceptable forum in any healthcare institute is mandatory. Where do we draw the line here? Nevertheless, once a digital process reaches the nurse, she needs extensive tools to utilise this technology. Today, senior nursing professionals ensure to coordinate this effectively in multiple fields, be it automatic infusion systems, monitoring devices, or apt software access to retrieve data at the touch of a button.

In an era where a remote control device can operate the lights, TV, room temperature, and draw curtains, life-saving devices are not far behind. The advantage has always been accuracy in drug delivery, calculating complex dosages in a fraction of a second, obtaining trends in blood pressure parameters over 24-48 hours, and many others. A sturdy system to calibrate the digital devices regularly is a must to ensure the equipment’s efficacy. Nurse leaders need to ensure processes that assure reliability are in place and that the responsibility to use the right technology at the designated event is held by the nurse.

As the younger generation of nurses starts practising nursing, most of them are digitally empowered and tech-savvy. How do we use this knowledge to build a better digital base for the nursing healthcare system? They can operate complex systems, and this helps us introduce devices like robotics in healthcare seamlessly. They are good mentors for others too. The downside is misuse and malpractice, which can go rampant with poor controls. The

The banking sector is a good example of how technology may be misused to cause the misappropriation of funds globally. Nurses in healthcare would need to be subject to an iron-clad system to safeguard their health.

Nurses are at the forefront of healthcare throughout India, including rural India. Today, prominent hospitals that have excelled at medical pinnacles in the city have opted for a social cause and offer medical services in the villages. Technology assists this endeavour, and nurses have a prominent task to enable teleconsultation and the use of digitised devices for monitoring and therapeutic interventions. The challenge of finding apt personnel who can communicate with the locals and are technology efficient is quite a task.

 As the existing protocols in the healthcare sector need to be modified to suit the new age of devices, it’s an additional process for nurse leaders to modify them aptly and make them user-friendly too. Over a certain time frame, a manual blood glucose monitoring device is now a digitised one, along with the body temperature monitoring device and patient-controlled. An additional change in protocols to prevent cross-infection and collating data in electronic medical records is then emphasised for all nurses as a mandatory act.

Globally, the case scenario is nurse-friendly, and we look forward to the same being replicated in the nursing healthcare field here too. The advantage to the nurse is that she is then enabled to practise with accuracy, achieve more, and save time that may be utilised towards more patient care actions.

With the advent of mechanisation, nurse leaders need to consciously attempt to take steps to preserve the culture of humanity, which has been the foundation of the nursing sciences. A nurse is a person who maximally coordinates with the patient, and the use of humanity in communication and the medical actions performed by the nurse need to continue. Unknowingly, machines have taken us away from people, which needs to be emphatically prevented in the medical field. Nursing is at the forefront.

Sensory overload from medical technology—alarms, alerts, and so on is a known fact. Senior nursing personnel have time and again made conscious efforts to overcome this factor. These efforts now have to majorly escalate and also proliferate in other fields where technology dominance has started to engage and upscale.

The increase in private-sector healthcare facilities has created a demand for excellence among consumers. Technology utilisation has increased, more so by the nursing fraternity, along with the yearning to meet the ever-increasing benchmarks. Nurses have a tough job meeting these infinite deadlines and competing effectively with the advances in medical technology.

To date, nurses have met the challenges with effective leadership role models and will continue to do so.