Nursing and Knowledge Work - Essay Example

"Nursing and Knowledge Work" is a decent example of a paper on care.
A patient comes into the hospital and started having tremors, with heavy perspiration, quivering, and throwing up. The nurse does a quick assessment of this semi-conscious patient and inquires if she has eaten anything before coming to the hospital, the patient replies that she was having pains and took some pain medication to relieve the pain. In this case, the nurse collects data by asking the patient how many pain killers she took prior to coming, what was the name of the medication. The patient did not remember how many pills she took Norco medicine for pain-relieving purpose. This data is processed with knowledge and becomes information, with the knowledge available to this nurse she understood the information and was able to use it to provide exceptional care to this patient (McGonigle & Kathleen,2010). A knowledge worker is one that depends on knowledge rather than skills to accomplish their job (Windsor, 2006)

An effective and precise data collected from an appropriate database allows a nurse to deal successfully with individual client responses. A nursing diagnosis, which is not parallel to the medical diagnosis, but is equally important for collaborative roles and actions in the caregiving process, depends solely on the type of data that illustrates the condition of the patient’s health and requirements for further improvements.

These days many successful databases are being used by health care setups to encourage effective caregiving to patients. Initially, handwritten medication orders were managed by the hospitals that led to serious medication errors with fatal results. Electronic medication management limits medication errors to an extent. EMAR (electronic Medical Administration Record) is the electronic documentation of the medications and treatments, all the clients in a particular setup receive. To authenticate the deliverance of each medication on any given day, the prescriber of the medication or pharmacist needs to sign it. This system allows everyone in the healthcare chain to be better informed about the care being provided. Handwritten medical administration records are still common in some setups, but they are not designed to reduce medication errors as nurses often misread instructions, dose, and dosage forms handwritten by Doctors. Moreover, the usual MAR is a slow system and it creates difficulties when medicines are required urgently.

Sometimes data is not complete or precise even on EMAR, such as in cases of newly admitted patients complete data is not usually available in their charts or there might be some missing history of the patient record. In such scenarios, data can be synthesized by actually following the charts and case histories to depict the full picture of the patient’s situation.

TIGER Initiative is a web-based education system that missions to organize nurses and other health care professionals to use information technology for improvements in the services they provide. Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform is focused on creating a virtual learning center for the development of educational summit in the fields of health sciences. The system is designed to develop a set of skills that are required by the nurses of the current date and in the future. These skills include basic computer skills, Information technology, skills related to nursing and education, clinical applications, staff education programs, virtual demonstration for the purpose of teaching, leadership development, and consumer empowerment. TIGER is working to materialize the dream of the United States health department, to have access to the 10-year health record of its entire citizens. (Nurse Educator,2010)

The aim stated by the officials of the program is to encourage the nurses and interlinked professionals to use newer technologies for the provision of safer, more effective, and patient-oriented health services.

The TIGER Institutive is in Phase III that is implementation. Few of the nurse educators have already adopted the program to enable the nurses to face the future challenges of the technology prosperous settings.