Negative Emotions Induced by Work-Related Information Technology Use in Hospital Nursing

Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout Through Reducing the Documentation Burden With an Operating Room Supply Scanning Approach

Documenting surgical supply items in the operating room can be a burdensome task for circulating nurses because of manual input within the electronic medical record. This can lead to documentation fatigue and contribute to nursing burnout. The aim of this quality improvement project was to design and implement a supply item scanning process and evaluate the effect on intraoperative documentation completion time, room turnover time, picklist documentation accuracy, nurse satisfaction, and burnout. The sample included nine acute care hospitals throughout the United States, with 189 total circulating nurses and 31 718 procedures occurring during the study timeframe of 8 months. Results indicated that nurses were able to complete documentation on average 37.33 minutes sooner, and the operating room turnover time decreased by 1.88 minutes. Although nurses reported that their perceived picklist documentation accuracy did not improve, and the presence of new scanning technology did not influence their hospital employment decision, subjective feedback was mostly positive, with most responses citing the helpfulness of scanning for documentation. This study shows that an interdisciplinary team can effectively work to optimize documentation efficiency and performance improvement using a scanning intervention. Lessons learned through this process can translate into optimizations elsewhere in the electronic medical record.

Information technology use and tasks left undone by nursing staff: A qualitative analysis

Nursing staff perceive information technology (IT) as time-consuming and impinging on direct patient care time. Despite this, researchers have directed little attention toward the interplay between IT use and tasks left undone by nursing staff. In this paper, we analyze interview and focus group data on hospital nursing staff's experience working with IT to identify ways IT use interacts with tasks left undone. We found that tasks left undone by nursing staff can have IT-related antecedents and that IT-related tasks are also sometimes left undone. This analysis adds to the body of knowledge by showing that tasks related to the work environment and IT can be left undone and that nursing staff avoid certain IT-supported tasks because they do not know how to do them or why they ought to be done. These findings form the basis for our call for further research on the topic.

How Digital Systems Are Used in Swedish Home Care Nursing Practice: A Qualitative Interview Study to Identify Challenges and Opportunities

This study investigates how digital technology is used (or not used) in home care nursing, to identify challenges and opportunities that can move the digitalization of home care nursing forward. The use of digital technology in daily practices of home care nursing was analyzed based on semistructured interviews in four Swedish home care organizations. The results correspond to the two initial stages of a design thinking process: (1) knowledge about users and the use context , presented as an up-to-date description of how digital technology has affected home care nursing practice, and (2) definition of areas for improvement , presented as challenges and opportunities. We identified the following areas to proceed with in the subsequent stages of designing home care nursing digitalization: (1) nurses' ability to access information and conduct documentation in the field, particularly how new digital systems are integrated with existing routines and systems; (2) the multitude of communication processes that nurses must manage, including communication channels that are used and the level of synchronicity; (3) an increasingly complex digital working environment, where evaluating existing systems and routines is one way to learn where improvements can be most efficient.