Professional Experience Placement

This article by Rouleau et al (2017) is a systematic review conducted to develop an understanding of the breadth of nursing care that can be influenced by using information communication technologies (ICT).  The premise of the review was that there is a broad range of ICTs used for supporting and providing health care. ICTs are becoming an impetus for quality healthcare delivery which can impact on their practice  by modifying how they plan, provide, review and document nursing care. The focus of the review was to extract data related to nurses.

The article provides detail regarding the search strategy, data extraction and management.  The results section also provides summaries of the information found. The authors diagrammatically present the results showing the nexus of nursing acquiring, deploying and maintaining resources; transforming resources into services and producing changes in patients’ conditions.  These are nursing sensitive outcomes.  Each of these areas are considered in relation to the data found. The themes that were mostly frequently reported were: documentation time; assessment, care planning, and evaluation; nurses’ perspectives of the quality of care provided; information quality and access and time spent for patient care. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction of nurses and patients using ICTs were also frequently mentioned.

The authors indicate in their conclusions that the use of ICTs  can affect nursing care system performance.  The notion that if nurses use ICTs to support their nursing interventions and the impact of using ICTs is negative or positive, it could impact on patient outcomes.  It is important to be mindful when planning and implementing the use of ICTs in healthcare settings.

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