Patient care technology has
become increasingly complex; transforming the way nursing care is
conceptualized and delivered. Before extensive application of technology,
nurses relied heavily on their senses of sight, touch, smell, and hearing to
monitor patient status and to detect changes. Over time, the nurses’ unaided
senses were replaced with technology designed to detect physical changes in
patient conditions.Consider the case of pulse oxymetry. Now pulse oxymetry
allows nurses to identify decreased oxygenation before clinical symptoms
appear, and thus more promptly diagnose and treat underlying causes.
While technology has the
potential to improve care, it is not without risks. Technology has been
described as both part of the problem and part of the solution for safer health
care, and some observers warned of the introduction of yet-to-be errors after
the adoption of new technologies.
Technology
Technologies used by nurses offer
the means for preventing errors and adverse events (e.g., medication errors,
miscommunications, delays in treatment, and adverse events—such as failure to
rescue, nosocomial infections, pressure ulcers, falls, and complications of
immobility). Yet technology also introduces unintended side effects and
opportunities for failures.
Organizational Factors
Organizational factors that
influence the use of technology include policies, resources, culture, social
norms, management commitment, training programs, and employee empowerment. It
has been noted that the effects of implementing technology—for example,
information technology—can vary widely depending on the setting, presumably due
to differences in the social-organizational environment such as workflow, work
tasks and processes,
Social Factors
Sandelowski noted the complex and
often troubled relationship between technology and nursing since the
establishment of nursing as a profession in the latter part of the 19th
century. Nurses have been both users of technology and facilitators for gaining
patient acceptance of technology, but it has sometimes been a struggle for
nurses to define the role of technology in their profession. Technology has
played out in the debates of caring versus curing and high-touch versus
high-tech in explaining the role of nursing in health care.
Physical Environment
The physical environment,
particularly in older buildings that were never designed to accommodate newer
technologies, is often a constraining factor in the use of many types of
equipment used by nurses. For example, research has shown that an ergonomic
approach that relies on equipment to promote safe patient handling decreases
musculoskeletal injuries in nurses
