AI and Nursing: Are We Ready?

Three considerations about nursing and AI.

Lisiane Pruinelli

In my role as a nursing professor under the University of Florida Artificial Intelligence Initiative (ai.ufhealth.org) and in leading several national and international efforts, I apply what I’ve learned in years of clinical and educational experience to articulate the implications of AI for the nursing profession.

Doing so, I see three broad considerations that will affect the profession’s future. 1) The need to take into account the history of the nursing profession and the fact we are the most trusted profession in the US, 2) The question of how we can best incorporate new technologies and/or ideas into the care we deliver every day, and 3) The issue of how we can build the new generation of nurses while also training current nurses in order that they can play a role at the forefront of the AI/health care revolution while continuing to be strong advocates for safe and ethical care.

These three considerations are elaborated below:

2024-01-25T10:10:18-05:00January 16th, 2024|artificial intelligence (AI), Nursing, Technology|1 Comment
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Implementation Science: Systematic, Sustainable, Evidence-Based Change

By Cagkan/Adobe Stock

Reading the article by Russell-Babin and colleagues in the December 2023 issue of AJN made me grateful for all the work that went into developing the nursing implementation science (IS) program at Inova. As a nurse working at this health care system, I’d like to share how I benefited from being in the first cohort of nurses trained and engaged in IS over the last three years.

For the past eight years, I’ve been a clinical coordinator of two different disease-specific programs—first stroke and now sepsis. In these roles, I’ve been engaged in many different quality improvement (QI) projects and have become familiar with the tools and processes used to improve patient care and outcomes.

Towards more comprehensive and systematic evidence-based change.

However, as I was invited to step into the world of IS, I began to realize that a strict QI approach cannot alone bring about all the changes we desire within the complex systems of health care. The fact is that clinicians, […]

2024-01-11T10:06:42-05:00January 11th, 2024|Nursing, nursing roles, Quality improvement|1 Comment
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Military Environmental Exposures: Recommended Reading in AJN’s November Issue

The November issue of AJN is now live.

What should nurses know about caring for people who have been exposed to potentially harmful agents—such as air pollutants, chemicals, radiation, warfare agents, and materials containing asbestos and lead—during military service? Read “Military Environmental Exposures” to find out.

Our November CE article, “Recognizing Transfusion-Associated Circulatory Overload,” reviews the most current definitions of this adverse transfusion reaction and outlines its characteristics and management.

“What Health Care Staff Who Experienced Assisted Patient Falls Can Teach Us: Implications for Fall and Fall Injury Risk,” presents qualitative findings from a QI project aimed at improving guidance for staff on the risks of assisting falling patients.

“Nursing Research, Step by Step: Sample Size Planning in Quantitative Nursing Research,” one in a series on clinical research by nurses, describes how to determine an appropriate sample size for a quantitative research project, and introduces the concepts of error, power, and effect size.

In “Optimizing Blood Culture Collection Volumes,” the authors discuss a QI project they conducted to understand the causes of underfilled and overfilled blood cultures obtained by nurses and PCTs and to reduce their incidence.

See also the extensive […]

2023-10-26T11:59:45-04:00October 26th, 2023|Nursing|0 Comments
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Nurse Burnout Recovery: Healing Ourselves to Better Serve Patients

Shedding parts of us that no longer serve us.

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

A couple months ago, I shared my experience with burnout and lessons learned from it. This experience propelled me into a healing journey. This healing journey wasn’t just about a newfound appreciation for “self-care.” Guided by several mentors, coaches, and healers, it incorporated modalities such as energy healing, spiritual healing, mindset work, inner child work, meditation, breathwork, and journaling. Burnout had initiated an intense deconstruction and deprogramming process that made it clear it was time to shed the pieces of me that were no longer serving me.

During this healing journey I asked myself:

  • Why do I do what I do?
  • Why do I feel that I’m not good enough/smart enough/skilled enough to take care of my patients?
  • Why do I feel like I can’t prioritize myself and my own needs so I can take better care of my patients?
  • Why do I feel like it’s not safe to speak up if I have a concern?
  • Why am I afraid to fail?

After being brutally honest with myself, I realized I had to go back to where the programming began.

Confronting our fears.

As children, we […]

2023-10-02T09:38:34-04:00October 2nd, 2023|Nursing, nursing perspective, wellness|1 Comment
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Prioritizing Assessment of Postoperative Movement-Evoked Pain

It hurts to move.

Staja Booker, PhD, RN

It’s 10:00, 15 hours postoperative, and your patient has eaten breakfast and is resting comfortably in bed. You ask the patient, “On a scale of zero to 10, how much pain are you having right now?” The patient replies “zero, as long as I don’t move.” The nurse documents the pain score as 0/10 and continues their rounds.

Most nurses are happy when patients report no pain. What is the nurse missing? The contextual factor called movement.

Several years ago, a research participant told me, “Ain’t no sense in getting up to hurt.” A very simple yet powerful statement began my quest to shift how we understand and assess the dynamics between pain and movement.

The realities are:

  • Movement increases acute pain postoperatively, and most patients are afraid to move even when the importance of ambulation is known.
  • Most patients need some type of pain medication or non-pharmacological intervention to engage in mobility-related activities.
  • Movement and mobility enhance recovery and rehabilitation.
  • Movement-evoked pain is as a major barrier to participating in activity-based interventions.

Movement-evoked pain is an important pain characteristic that describes pain and discomfort during active or passive motion of the affected area. Yet, despite awareness among nurses of the importance of setting function-related pain goals, most of our pain assessments are performed when […]

2023-07-31T09:32:18-04:00July 31st, 2023|Nursing, patient engagement, patient experience|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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