Presented by: Ms. Annabelle S. Belangel, R.N.

 Nursing informatics evolved from the computing and information processing sciences introduced in the late 1960s to support medical practitioners, health service administrators, and governments.  1992 – the American Nurses Association (ANA) officially recognized the discipline as a nursing specialty and defined its scope and practice.

 International Medical Informatics Association – gives some insight into the global developments and foundations of medical and nursing informatics disciplines.  The search of World Wide Web illuminates the available associated educational programs and the pioneers who promoted the discipline in Europe and the United States.

 The “medical” in medical informatics denotes all of health care in other European languages, although it connotes “physicians” in English.  Today, as a result, the term health informatics is gaining greater acceptance.  Medical and nursing informatics become a subset of health informatics.

 Nursing informatics education may be viewed from three different perspectives:  It is about nurse academics using computers, information, and telecommunication technologies to support teaching and learning.  It is about teaching nurses to use these technologies to support their practice  It required to prepare nurse informaticians.

 Center for Health Informatics and Multi- professional Education (CHIME) at University College London Medical School – maintains a public website with information and resources for education and training in medical, nursing, and dental informatics.  European Union – funded a number of special projects to improve health informatics education and training for health professionals.

 The main mission in Europe :  Is to establish a stable infrastructure that improves healthcare quality, facilitates the reduction of errors, and the delivery of evidence- based and cost-effective care.

 Continuity of care and availability of information Telemedicine or Telehealth - which is the practice of medicine and nursing over a distance where data and transmitted through telecommunication system, is widely disseminated in parts over Europe.

 1980 – more Australian nurses are interested in nursing informatics than there are today, as evidenced by the decline in nurse membership of our well-established national professional informatics organization.  All basic nurse education was transferred from hospital-based programs to the university sector’s during the 1980s.

 1983 – University of Victoria, Canada began to offer a four-year Bachelor of Science degree program in health information science, using a mandatory cooperative education model.  Since the late 1980s, several schools in the United States have offered master’s level programs in nursing informatics.

 There are only two programs at the doctoral level, which means that nurses wishing to specialize in nursing informatics at the doctoral level often do so within other specialties.  South American countries, notably Brazil and Argentina, have just begun to introduce nursing informatics education.  In Asia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan are actively promoting the discipline.

 1991-the New Zealand Ministries of Health and Education introduced Guidelines for Teaching Nursing Informatics into their undergraduate nursing programs.

 At the International level, the International Council of Nurses is the leading development of a universal language for defining and describing nursing practive – the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP).  The purpose of ICNP is to provide a tool for describing and documenting key elements that represent clinical nursing practice.

 Historically, nurses are used to facing challenges, adapting new tools in to practice to improve their performance creating new models to enhance patient care.  Nurses was considered primary users of technology in health care.

 Technology is visible tendency in:  Health  Nursing education  Nursing practice  Nursing research  Administration

 Each country has varied levels of development and deployment of technological resources  The initial motivation to develop computer systems in the health care area was driven by financial and administrative concerns.  The hospital sector can be considered the area better served by information system.

 Germany, France, United kingdom, Italy Finland, Norway and other counties are practicing telemedicine, but the practice by other allied professions is rare.

 Therefore, Nursing informatics is distinct discipline for which a variety of educational programs are required. Much needs to be done to raise the awareness and skills of nurse academics so they can ensure that nurses, now and in the future, are adequately prepared to leverage new technologies.  The increasing availability of new technologies is enabling the use of new educational delivery methods that promote student-led independent learning.

 Arnold, J. Nursing informatics educational needs. Computers in Nursing 1996;14(6):  Donalson, S., Gerdin, U. Ball, M. and Hannah,K. (2000). Nursing Informatics: Where Caring and Technology Meet (Health Informatics). Pennsylvania.  Morris, T., McCain, K. The structure of medical informatics journal literature. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 1998;5;  McCormick, K.A. (2005). Essentials of Nursing Informatics. McGraw Hill. Washington DC.