Are we preparing nurse leaders for information-age activities in our practice settings?

By Mary Oakes, RN, MSN; Pamela Potter, RN, MSN, DNSc; Holly Shadburne, RN, BScN; Noreen Frisch, RN, PhD, FAAN and Elizabeth Borycki, RN, HBScN, MN, PhD

Over the past year, a team of researchers from the University of Portland (Oregon) has joined with faculty at the University of Victoria to ask if future nursing leaders are being prepared to negotiate nursing needs in our technologically-enabled future. Questions arose from the team’s understanding that nursing care requires a presence in the developing electronic health care record (EHR) for our discipline to document nursing care and outcomes, and to have a voice in care decisions, when information are maintained in the EHR.

Mary Oakes, Pamela Potter and Holly Shadburne (U Portland) and Noreen Frisch and Elizabeth Borycki (UVic) conducted a review of the graduate nursing curricula of 38 Schools of Nursing on the Pacific coast. We reviewed required and elective courses for those nurses being prepared for senior management and supervisory positions at the Masters level and learned that in only 38.8% of programs, future nurse leaders were required to study any concepts that were related to health informatics or nursing informatics. Further, we found no evidence that these future nurse leaders were being introduced to issues of how to procure and evaluate vendor-supplied and marketed EHR systems. While we know that nurse leaders/managers/supervisors are not being prepared to be informatics experts, we are concerned that current curricula are not addressing factors such as nursing documentation, nursing’s need to use trended data for quality performance, and nursing’s access to information in the EHR systems being marketed to hospitals and health care agencies. The research team is concerned that future nurse leaders may be in a position of accepting direction from non-clinical IT staff or EHR vendors who make recommendations to health care leaders about what is needed and what is not needed in new electronic record systems.

We raise these concerns about the future of our discipline when nursing leaders do not have the background to advocate for nursing presence in the EHR and where procurement decisions are being made without active involvement of nursing leadership. We are recommending further review of curricula for preparing nursing leaders and inclusion of sufficient content in Master’s programs so that nursing leaders can ask appropriate questions in the procurement process and involve nursing informaticists and consultants as needed.

Mary Oakes, Pamela Potter, Holly Shadburne, Noreen Frisch and Elizabeth Borycki, will be presenting their work in May at the NANDA-International Conference in Houston, Texas.

From the 2012 Spring Communiqué — Informatics