Encouraging Nursing Informatics Competencies in Education

by June Kaminski, RN MSN PhD(c)
Editor in Chief

The CJNI was initiated by June Kaminski in 2006. June was President of CNIA in 2008-9, and Director of Communication from 2003 to 2012. She is currently President Elect of the Canadian Nurses for Health and the Environment; President and Research Chair for Sigma Theta Tau International, Xi Eta Chapter; and Chief Senior Editor of the Online Journal of Nursing Informatics In 2012, June was honored to receive the CASN and Canada Health Infoway’s inaugural Nursing Faculty E-Health Award 2012 in Ottawa Canada. She offers the Nursing Informatics Learning Centre for nurses.

EDITORIAL

The preparation of this issue of the Canadian Nursing Informatics Journal has been particularly delightful. Many of the articles published in this issue were written by Masters of Nursing students from the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, under the expert tutelage of Dr. Wendy Young. This publication collaboration is the epitome of how education can ignite an interest and aptitude for nursing informatics theory and application to practice within graduate education.

The CJNI is proud to offer a venue for this exploration, and encourages other Canadian schools of nursing to consider a similar assignment for their nursing courses. In this assignment, students were required to apply a change management theory to a particular aspect of nursing informatics. The six students who published their papers in this issue focused on several aspects of nursing informatics including Computerized Provider Order Entry Systems (CPOE); Mobile Health (mHealth); Bar-Coded Medication Administration (BCMA);  Wikis for nursing orientations;  electronic clinical documentation; and implementing electronic medical records.  Change management theories applied included Lewin’s Force Field Analysis and Change theory; Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation Theory;  Kotter’s Change Management Theory; and Lippitt’s theory of Planned Change.

Each of the papers provided concrete hypothetical examples of how nursing informatics could be applied within the student’s own area of practice. These students reside in different provinces throughout Canada, which afforded a national perspective to their work when viewed as a whole. They also reflected the entry level nursing informatics competencies for registered nurses outlined by the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN) in 2012.

In the spirit of further collaboration, the CJNI Editorial Board invites other Schools of Nursing to create assignments that could eventually be published as a class or cohort in our future issues. These assignments could be in the form of papers;  multimedia productions;  system, book or app reviews;  graphical representations such as infographics; informatics projects, and so on.

If you are interested in such an enterprise, email us for more details and discussion.

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