Never assume...

That was my lesson this week. I work with a lot of very experienced nurses who know a lot of things. I found out this week that many of them do not know how to use many of the office automation tools we have access to on our computers.

Case in point, one nurse needed help dealing with attachments in Outlook. Another needed information on how to open attached PDFs and fill them out. Still another needed help troubleshooting what was going wrong with her e-mail.

We have an assigned support person (who, incidentally has another job besides user support) but she's on vacation. As a result, yours truly got to be the support tech on the floor. I don't mind it at all, but it does show how technology skills are being thought of as natural requirements, especially for new nurses, most of whom, have worked with technology during their entire nursing school experience. Happily, our hospital system is recognizing the need for additional computer training for both nurses and ancillary staff and is making it available to those who wish to utilize it.

Here are a few articles of note on this subject.

A new definition for nursing informatics (from AdvanceWEB)
This editorial describes the field of nursing informatics.

This article, The impact of information technology on nursing practice and knowledge by Melanie Anne Cox was featured in a book called Consumer-Centered Computer-Supported Healthcare for Healthy People.