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Hi, I’m Viv Bennett and I’m the Director for Nursing at the Department of Health In
England. I’m a nurse and Health visitor by background and I’ve been working in a
national post for five years now. And one of the things I’ve been doing throughout
the time I’ve worked here is to really look into a range of issues around nursing and
both technology in terms of equipment and in information.
For me, it is impossible to conceive nursing in the 21st century without encompassing technology
and what technology can do for us in providing better care to our patients. And some of you
will know that we are currently working on a nursing vision and strategy for England
and there are some really key values and beliefs of nursing that I think we can use technology
going forward to make stronger. And the first of these I touch on is communication.
We’ve had a number of conservations with nurses and about how they communicate to people
and how face to face communication can be of the highest quality but also how on occasions
people are now looking for technologies everything from phones through to emails to social media
to get information and to have conversations. We did some work very recently with the British
Youth Council and they were very clear that for a school age child and young person being
able to be communicated with or even be part of a communication that involved technology
was very important so my first kind of factor is for communication.
The second is for information and that covers a whole range of issues from how do we provide
the right information to our patients’ families and populations to how do we collect clinical
information in a usable format to how do we have appropriate manager information that’s
collected with the least amount of time removed from the clinical area but us meaningful and
useful in what we do.
So I think all of those things are really, really important and people will have heard
a lot about information and technology for productivity. I think that is a very important
thing to do. We all want to create as much time as we can for spending on nursing duties
with our patients and we hear a lot about cutting bureaucracy but a lot of nurses now
tell me they are now down to documenting what is necessary for safe patient care and what
they need is ways that they would have in other walks of their life to collect this
information quickly, easily, at the point of care and only once. And for that we need
to look to varying kinds of technologies.
We know that in the community, community nurses are still spending a lot of time collecting
information, actually having to write it down, having to drive to another place to enter
it on to a computer so for these nurses particularly, use of various devices like digipens and tough
books and various others of those are very important to them to be able to construct
their work in a modern way.
I think beyond that though we need to be starting to think very imaginatively about how technology
can actually support us to deliver care in different ways and deliver care that meets
that health needs that will be facing us as we move through the 20th century* [*correction
as Viv meant to say 21st century].
We know that nurses increasingly are going to need to work with people to help them support
their own care in managing their long term conditions and we already see how use of telehealth,
remote monitoring and virtual care can support people to actually be able to manage their
care, be very powerful in the care relationship and very importantly be able to stay at home
whenever that is safe to do so.
And we will see more of this and we will have technologies that will enable us to look after
people who have perhaps less stable healthcare needs in the community as long as we can get
real-time test results to nurses and clinical advice for back up so we need to be thinking
about how this can extend our range of care really in the very near future.
We can also use technology I think to communicate with each other very well and I have become
a recent convert to Twitter and some of you may have seen things that we have tweeted
from the Department of Health that will be of interest to you. What I have particularly
found to be hugely valuable is to get involved in nurse chats on Twitter and to be able to
collect information, views and different points of view from nurses from all types of service
from front line care through to leadership or education positions about specific issues.
So I would ask you to think about modern ways of creating a community of nurses so that
we can really drive forward our care to meet the emerging health needs for the 21st century.