From the article:
The truth of the matter is, professional nursing has long held goals that were never fully achievable before the informatics revolution currently taking place (McBride, 2005). We’ve long been held responsible for ensuring safety, coordinating care, utilizing research findings and evaluating outcomes, but we have not had the systems in place to make that really happen.
The emphasis in nursing, heretofore, has been largely on the individual nurse interacting on a one-to-one basis with patients and their families to meet their particular needs. If a mistake was made or a need unaddressed, the nurse was personally responsible, not the system. Though nurse managers and executives were expected to facilitate the work of individuals, those administrators were themselves hampered by a lack of standardized measurements and outcomes that would enable them to encourage their staffs to be accountable for their practice.
A new way of thinking is taking shape, and it is full of enormous promise. Without discounting the importance of individual responsibility or one-to-one relationships, quality care is increasingly seen as a matter of healthy work environments. The IOM’s report To Err Is Human (2000) noted that individuals can only be successful if processes are in place that enable them to succeed.
http://nursingsociety.org/RNL/4Q_200.../feature5.html
I don’t understand why an “informatics revolution” needs to take place before the attitudinal change from do no harm as an individual responsibility to safety as a system concern can take place.
I’m not opposed to technology that enhances the nurse’s ability to provide safe effective therapeutic care. Too bad technology that interferes with the professional judgment of the registered nurse and other professionals is sold to hospitals.
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