As a former operating room nurse and nurse educator, I was pleased to see that this year's Nurses' Week theme is "the Balance of Mind, Body and Spirit."
While the theme easily applies to our personal lives, it's equally important to achieve it professionally, especially when the increasing demands of our field are causing dissatisfaction, burnout, and staff turnover. The reality is that nurses' lives, especially at work, can be quite unbalanced between patients and paperwork – the demands of treating patients, communicating with care teams and record-keeping can be daunting. However, smart and integrated technologies can help improve our ability to provide high-quality patient care, which in turn improves job satisfaction and that balance we all strive for.
Today, nurses are expected to do more with less. A demanding and stressful work situation is unhealthy and unbalancing for nurses, which in turn can not only impact the care they are providing, but also the healthcare system at large, as dissatisfied nurses lead to burnout and increased turnover rates. In fact, the continuing stress on nurses to meet overwhelming demands, particularly on the emotional level with patients and their families, has been coined as "compassion fatigue.1"
Nurses possess a distinct desire to help patients. This empathetic disposition is the very reason most of us choose this field. Yet spending time directly caring for patients is no longer the main focus of a nurse's day. Studies show that 35.3 percent of nurses' time is spent on documentation and less than 20 percent is spent on direct patient care2. In fact, one study found that only 31 minutes during a nurse's typical 10-hour shift is spent with the patient performing tasks like care assessment and reading vital signs3.
I spent the first 15 years of my career in trauma surgery working with some of the most difficult patient cases. I've since transitioned from hands-on patient care to becoming what I like to think of as a "nurse advocate" in the technology space. My experiences in the OR have definitely helped in this regard and I've noticed that it's crucial that healthcare technologies, particularly those used in hospitals, are built with nurses in mind.
Technology can offer a key solution to help mitigate workforce issues and provide value for both nurses and patients. Medical device integration and smart, connected technologies help support nurses and clinicians, allowing for more efficient clinical workflows and perhaps most importantly, returning nurses' time to what truly draws them to this field: direct patient care. Recent studies have shown that nurses with medical device integration are happier and report 61 percent greater job satisfaction.
Technology and health informatics cannot replace the human element of nursing and patient care, but they can go a long way in supporting nurses' workloads, ultimately helping to improve outcomes for patients. With simpler documentation methods and continuous communication between technologies, like medical devices and EMR/EHRs, nurses regain more balance inside the hospital, and truly focus on their patients – and themselves. While at times I miss being in the OR working directly with patients, helping to train and advocate for technologies that improve effeciences makes me proud to be a part of something that is not only advancing the field, but helping put balance back into patient care.
1 ONJ
2 The Permanente Journal https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037121/
3 The Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety
Cathleen Olguin, MBA, BSN, RN, CNOR, is a clinical solutions manager at Qualcomm Life. She and her team work to implement and manage healthcare information technology solutions and develop worflow processes. Cathleen has more than 15 years' experience working nursing