Trends and Issues in Nursing Informatics Column

By Melanie Neumeier RN MN

Melanie Neumeier is an Assistant Professor in the BScN Program at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. Her research interests include integrating new technologies into nursing education and interdisciplinary collaboration in enhancing evidence-informed nursing practice. Melanie first became interested in nursing informatics through a nursing informatics course she took in her MN program at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and has since continued that interest in her research, her writing, and her teaching.

Citation: Neumeier, M. (2025). EMRs are finally becoming commonplace, but why aren’t universities given the tools to train their students to use them? Trends and Issues in Nursing Informatics Column. Canadian Journal of Nursing Informatics, 20(2). https://cjni.net/journal/?p=14786

I recently had a student ask me “Why do we still have to do paper charting in lab? Why don’t we use an EMR like we do in practice?”.

I thought about a politically correct way to respond, but this is a question that frustrates me regularly. “Well, you need to be prepared for if the system goes down so that you know what to do.”

“Yeah, okay. But how come we never use an EMR?” she said with a tone of exasperation. I looked at her for a minute, not really sure what to say.

The truth is we never use one because we are not allowed to. Despite continuous negotiations with our vendor here in Alberta, our universities and the nursing students attending them are still not allowed playground access to the system. We discuss the need to meet entry to practice competencies related to nursing informatics. We discuss our responsibility to our clinical partners to have students prepared to provide care in a safe manner. We discuss the need for faculty members to stay up to date with changes in the system so they can field student questions with confidence; but the request is always denied. “I’m not sure what they think we’re going to do with it” a fellow faculty member says. “Why they don’t want students having practice with the system is beyond me.”

The students do of course get a training session from the district before they start their clinical rotations, but for some students these virtual sessions do not feel like the best way to approach the situation.

“Last semester they scheduled my training during the last week of classes. The training is mandatory, so I had to miss my classes. A lot of other students did too, and it was hard to focus on the training because I was worried about falling behind in class and then I was worried that I missed something in the training.”

I remembered this nightmare semester where we were scrambling to try and offer make-up classes and labs and re-do assessments because we had no control over the training schedule, and they were not about to adjust it for us. We were told that the dates were set in advance and there was no opportunity to change them. Students had to attend on the scheduled dates or would not be able to practice in clinical settings.

I agreed with her that this was not an ideal situation, and this ended up circling us back to the original question, “So why aren’t we allowed to practice with this at school?”

“That’s a good question,” I responded. “I don’t know.”