Technology and humane nursing care: (ir)reconcilable or invented difference?

AIM(S) OF THE PAPER: This paper questions the validity of a boundary presumed to exist between technology and humane care. It argues the need for reconciliation of presumed tension(s) between technology and person focused care and the need to reconsider our ways of understanding the relations between technology and nursing.

BACKGROUND/RATIONALE

Recent scholarship in the social sciences related to reproductive and imaging technologies and emergency resuscitation are examined and arguments are presented that question the appropriateness of a humanist view that emphasizes technology on the nonhuman and nonnatural side of a human/nonhuman, nature/artifice divide. It is argued that what determines experiences such as dehumanization is not technology per se but how individual technologies are used and operate in specific user contexts, the meanings that are attributed to them, how individuals or cultural groups define what is human, and the organizational, human, political and economic technological system (technique) that creates rationale and efficient order within nursing, health care and society.

CONCLUSION

The paper concludes by asking whether the commonplace appeal to resolve tensions between humane care and technology has erroneously highlighted technology as the reason for impersonal care, and encourages re-examination of the relationship(s) between technology, humane care and nursing practice.

Nursing in a technological world: searching for healing communities

A research dialectic between philosophy of technology and nurses' work in acute care surfaces parallel technological practices that threaten the healing nature of two modern projects: health care and ecological restoration. A metaphor of ecological restoration is used to explore the consequences of denatured health care work for the welfare of patients, families, practitioners, and healing communities. It is argued that in health care systems where the mismatch between treatment options and resources for care steadily grows, the nursing discipline must develop ecological literacy for a technological world.

[Recent advances on routine urinalysis]

Urine qualitative/semiquantitative tests with reagent-strip and microscopic examination(sediments) are most popular and basic clinical laboratory tests. However, the accuracy and precision of those tests have not been more reliable than that of clinical chemistry or hematology, mainly due to the instability of urine specimen and subjective analysis procedure. Automated analyzer with compact size and high quality of both reagent-strip method and sediments(formed elements or particles) have been commonly used in many laboratories and guidelines on urinalysis of JCCLS(Japan), NCCLS(USA) and ECLM(EU) are publishing in succession recently. These advances are expected to lead to a solution for those problems in the urinalysis field.

Technical efficiency and economies of diversification in health care

In national health services, where there is a tendency towards a lack of resources and a continuous increase in demand, it is necessary to implement decisions that promote efficiency. In this paper we focus on potential diversification economies as a strategy to increase efficiency levels. We evaluate the change in efficiency in Catalan hospitals between 1987 and 1992, and analyse the presence of possible diversification economies in each hospital. We use Data Envelopment Analysis, which does not need information on either input or output prices. The results are that the majority of hospitals could increase their efficiency and reduce their costs by diversification to the output-mix offered. Potential productivity gains are between 29% and 46%.

The impact of the Austrian hospital financing reform on hospital productivity: empirical evidence on efficiency and technology changes using a non-parametric input-based Malmquist approach

The 1997 hospital financing reform has been supposed to reduce considerable inefficiencies in the provision of hospital care in Austria. This paper focuses on the changes in hospital productivity between 1994 and 1998, thus including three years before the reform and two years after the reform. Using Data Envelopment Analysis we calculated the input-based Malmquist index, which is then decomposed into indices of pure technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change and technology change. The results illustrated a considerably positive shift in technology between 1996 and 1998, whereas the intended enhancement in technical efficiency has not yet taken place.

The central equipment pool, an opportunity for improved technology management

A model for a central equipment pool managed by a clinical engineering department has been presented. The advantages to patient care and to the clinical engineering department are many. The distribution of portable technology that has been traditionally managed by the materials management function is a logical match to the expanding role of clinical engineering departments in technology management. Accurate asset management tools have allowed us to provide reliable measures of infusion pump utilization, permitting us to predict future needs as programs expand. Thus we are more actively involved in strategic technology planning. The central equipment pool is an excellent opportunity for the clinical engineering department to increase its technology management activities.

[Diagnosis and the technology for optimizing the medical support of a troop unit]

The work is devoted to investigation of the system of military unit medical support with the use of principles and states of organizational diagnosis; development of the method allowing to assess its functional activity; and determination of optimization trends. Basing on the conducted organizational diagnosis and expert inquiry the informative criteria were determined which characterize the stages of functioning of the military unit medical support system. To evaluate the success of military unit medical support the complex multi-criteria pattern was developed and algorithm of this process optimization was substantiated. Using the results obtained, particularly realization of principles and states of decision taking theory in machine program it is possible to solve more complex problem of comparison between any number of military units: to dispose them according to priority decrease; to select the programmed number of the best and worst; to determine the trends of activity optimization in corresponding medical service personnel.

Requirements engineering: the key to designing complex medical systems

A variety of business systems, clinical work systems, instrumentation systems, information systems, infrastructure systems, and management systems interact to make the modern healthcare facility work. The key to designing for such a system is systems engineering, a skill often little appreciated among clinical engineers. At the heart of systems engineering is requirements engineering and management (REAM), which is defined as "the process of discovering, documenting and managing systems requirements." The principal activities of REAM include eliciting, understanding, negotiating, describing, validating, and managing system requirements. When REAM is done improperly, the resulting system will be satisfactory only if chance intervenes. Well-done REAM is likely to bring the project in on time, under budget, and at full performance.

The diffusion of new medical technologies in the private sector of the U.K. health care system

Eleven percent of the U.K. population holds private health care insurance, and 2.2 billion Pounds are spent annually in the acute sector of private health care. Although isolated from policy discussions about new medical technology in the National Health Service, the private sector encounters these interventions regularly. During 18 months in one company, a new medical technology was encountered on average every week; 59 leading edge technologies were submitted for authorization (18 on multiple occasions). There are certain constraints on purchasers of health care in the private sector in dealing with new technology; these include fragmentation of the sector, differing rationalities within companies about limitations on eligibility of new procedures while competing for business, the role and expertise of the medical adviser, and demands of articulate customers. A proactive approach by the private sector to these challenges is hampered by its independence. Poor communication between the public and private sectors, and the lack of a more inclusive approach to policy centrally, undermine the rational diffusion and use of new medical technology in the U.K. health care system.

Benchmarking laboratory operations

OBJECTIVE

Explain why benchmarking is a valued management tool and what ratios or percentages are most useful in benchmarking laboratory operations. Review the major benchmarking subscription products currently available to laboratory managers in the United States.

DATA SOURCES

Current literature and Internet sites.

CONCLUSIONS

The process of comparing laboratory operations over time with peer groups using statistical tools and benchmarking can provide valuable insights into areas of operation that need improvement.

Unifying organizational approaches to measuring and managing patient outcomes

Information about patient outcomes is increasingly available to guide consumers in their selection of healthcare. By unifying the traditionally separate programs of performance improvement, case management, and research, nurse executives can take control of care processes and outcomes. This article provides four case examples of patient care improvements achieved using performance improvement, case management, and research approaches. The use of the technologies outlined in the Johnson and Nolan article in this issue, "A Guide to Choosing Technology to Support the Measurement of Patient Outcomes", also is described.

The future of nursing education

Market-driven economic policy, dramatic technology developments, changing demographics, and the knowledge explosion are rapidly changing health care and educational institutions as well as creating a climate of continuous rapid change. Nursings' contract with society requires the profession to be responsive to these changes. Four views of changes in nursing practice and therefore nursing education are presented. Changes in the role of faculty and in the nature of the curriculum are described. Twelve strategies for facilitating change are listed.

Recovering ethics after 'technics': developing critical text on technology

Much modern science and ethics debate is on high-profile problems such as animal organ transplantation, genetic engineering and fetal tissue research, in discourse that assumes technical tones. Other work, such as narrative ethics, expresses the failed promise of technology in the vivid detail of human experience. However, the essential nature of contemporary technology remains largely opaque to our present ethical lens on health care and on society. The limited controversies of modern science and ethics perpetuate 'technics', a technical, problem-solving mindset that fails to grapple successfully with the complexity of technology. A critical dialectic between practice and scholarship widens the ethical conversation in nursing to consider technology as an ongoing set of daily and fundamental moral choices on how we live. Critical text on technology recovers ethics from the limits of technics, and assists nurses to develop an inherent knowledge of technology that is needed to provide ethical care in a technological world. There are overlooked ethical challenges in the mundane, everyday routine activities of professional practice, and these have gone largely unexamined. Ethical behavior is not the display of one's moral rectitude in times of crisis. It is the day-to-day expression of one's commitment to other persons and the ways in which human beings relate to one another in their daily interactions.

Troubling distinctions: a semiotics of the nursing/technology relationship

I consider the discursive practices that have served conceptually and ontologically to trouble the boundaries between nursing and technology: between nurse/human/subject and machine/non-human/object. Nursing and technology have been semiotically related largely by two processes: (a) by the metaphor that depicts nursing as technology and (b) by opposition, or as not like and even in conflict with technology. Less frequently but no less significantly, nursing and technology have been semiotically linked (c) by the metaphor that depicts technology as nursing and (d) by metonymy, or by word or picture juxtapositions of nursing with technology. The troubling distinctions between nursing and technology suggest yet another reason why the construction of difference continues to elude nursing.

Multiple-perspectives model of medical technology

A model of medical technology is proposed, containing six different perspectives of its definition: physical, information, knowledge, process, change, and as an enabling and strategic resource. These perspectives are integrated to form an organizational dimension. The contributions of this model to better management of medical technology are described and its relation to other models in the literature is discussed.

Introduction of new technology to the office

In this article, the authors review the basics of effective marketing and introduction of new technology for plastic surgery. The article addresses the financial issues involved in this new technology, as well as issues of staffing, safety and efficacy of the procedure, insurance, and use of the new equipment. The article closes with an affirmation of the importance of training courses and the necessity of serving patient interests.

Technology + teamwork = success

"Pain is an incredibly complicated pathophysiologic process, as well as a highly individualized experience," says Dr. K.A. Erdmann, a pain management specialist with American Pain Management (APM), a high technology medical consulting firm. "In fact, it is by far the most subjective, difficult, and expensive symptom to treat. The pain impulse can be generated anywhere along the peripheral nerve, up the tracts in the spinal cord, and even into the brain itself."