NI colleagues

I learned just today who the Nurse Informatics person is for my department. I am excited to work with her to learn more about her role and the many ways that she can help me to learn to manage information for my department. In the past I have relied on the unit secretary to show me methods of looking up and storing information. I have learned a lot from the unit secretary and am grateful for her help. I plan to talk with the Nurse Informatics person over my department this coming week.

Why I need to know about information management

As a nurse educator understanding how to use and manage information is vital. The students that I teach will need to be conversant in information management for them to be successful as nurses and I will have a responsibility to teach them the information management that applies to their role as a nurse. As a teacher information management will help me to be able to access and use a broader range of training materials in teaching.

What is happening related to IT in my clinical setting.

In the operating room where I work as the clinical educator there is a lot of use of computers. All of the required education modules for nurses is online and my role is to instruct the staff how to access the education modules on the computer education site and then how to use the site to read and answer questions. As the clinical educator I am responsible to train all new staff including how to access computer information for education, email, and orientation information. All of the orientation, education, policies, procedures, and protocol files are maintained electronically. The operating room RN's do limited computer charting, but most of the patient information is accessible on the computer. All nursing staff are required to know how to access patient information and how to input information to order blood products and order laboratory testing. As the clinical educator I conduct and input audits for department compliance. These audits are all electronic. I also create PowerPoint presentations and education modules for the operating room staff. IT is very important to me to perform my job.
I see IT becoming as common as pens and papers in the operating room and the nursing profession as a whole.

I hope I got it right!

So, I have changed the setting so that anyone can view my blog.

Informatics Class

This is my first experience to blog. It will be fun to share information this way.