How do you feel about Technology in nursing?

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Specializes in neuro, ccu, med/surg icu, ER.

One of my entrance Q's....I replied by saying technology is a must when it comes to lower health care costs and faster patient recovery...in addition, anything that decreases the nurse to patient ratio should be welcomed due to the higher quality of care the nurses would be able to give. What do you think? And should my answer be more specific as far as naming a new discovery?

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I'm not sure technology has lowered Nurse to pt ratios, in fact, I believe that many technological advances have increased these ratios, because now we are able to do more, because supposedly some new piece of equipment has shortened the amount of time we must spend in a patients room.

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Specializes in neuro, ccu, med/surg icu, ER.

So then nurses are unable to spend quality time caring for their patients? this doesn't make any sense! Boy, do I need to read more and ask more q's!

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I feel that technology does and will make a hugh difference to nursing in the future. At the moment nursing and technology have come a long way, but I feel it still has a long way to come.

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Technology is a double edged sword. Really and truly.

While technology makes us able to monitor our patients more closely, it often does have the undesired side effect of the nurse spending less time with the patient. I speak from experience here.

My first OB job was at a huge hospital with about 4000 deliveries a year (that's a lot), and I often had 2-3 patients in labor at a time who were very, very sick. I didn't learn how to care for a woman in labor there, I learned how to read a fetal monitor. Period. It wasn't until I moved to a smaller hospital where every patient WASN'T hooked up to the monitor that I actually learned how to take care of a PATIENT...a human being.

Same is true for NICU. When I worked there, you really get desensitized to the apnea alarms and o2 sat alarms going off constantly. While you're vigilant about your babies, some people have a tendency to not respond as quickly to alarms because of all the false readings.

Then you have the whole 'slippery slope' argument. Some doctors (sorry, I'm an OB nurse, so all my stuff is OB related) argue that all the technology with electronic fetal monitoring has done is increased the c-section rate. To a point they're right. Some women end up having c-sections for things seen on a fetal monitor that may or may not be detrimental to a baby, when in the past, that same patient wouldn't have been on a monitor at all and might have delivered (lady partslly) a perfectly normal baby. On the other hand, it has saved lots of babies' and mothers' lives.

Like I said, double edged sword. But love it or hate it, technology is definitely here to stay in healthcare.

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Specializes in neuro, ccu, med/surg icu, ER.

Great responses!! thank you very much!!

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