RCN Congress calls for nurse IT involvement

Nurses need training and guidance to use new IT systems within the NHS or they risk being left on the sidelines, delegates at this week’s Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Congress in Harrogate have argued.

Graeme Elrick, chair of the RCN Information Nursing group, said that it was important that nurses control how IT delivers care before it starts controlling them. Citing that 91% of nurses are not trained on the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), Elrick argued that to do this, nurses needed training and support.

IT could be a benefit to nurses through streamlining their workload, said Patricia Bottrill, former chair of the RCN Governing Council, and that it should serve the purpose of giving them more time to spend with patients. Margaret Devlin, RCN board member in Northern Ireland, agreed that it has potential for saving time in accessing lab results and other patient information, but cautioned that data input must be accurate.

A side effect of the upswing of use of IT in health, said other speakers, is that nurses have to keep up with their patients’ expectations, and because health information is available freely on the internet, nurses find their patients more questioning.

E-health is a large part of the future of nursing, argued Bernice Baker of the RCN Information Nursing Group, saying that IT has become a professional issue for nurses.

The comments echoed those of Sharon Levy, Informatics Advisor at the RCN, who told E-Health Insider in an interview last month that IT training was a major issue for nurses, especially older ones.

He said that general knowledge of NHS IT reform among the nursing profession needed improving: "When you talk to nurses working for the National Programme for IT they think that the programme is not celebrated enough.

"We need to see more nurses knowing about the programme and appropriate mechanisms for them to influence how it is progressing for the benefit of both patients and clinicians."

The matter for discussion, ‘Can IT really help?’, was submitted to the agenda by the Information in Nursing Forum. No motions were passed or put forward.