IT directors should expect to hear more from senior nurses as a result of an informatics leadership course launched by NHS Connecting for Health’s director of nursing.
Susan Hamer is aiming to put 500 nurses, mostly deputy directors of nursing, through the three-day 'Leadership for Informed Practice' course, which has been set up to help them consider clinical leadership issues as IT and information begin to impact on nursing practice.
The first 14 nurses undertook the course last week. It will run until next Easter, with e-coaching and membership of an NHS network also on offer to participants.
Dr Hamer said: “We have sold this as a leadership programme, not as an informatics course.
“This is not about the practicalities of putting in a system but about how an organisation has a different vision about what services look like when they are technology enabled.”
She told eHealth Insider that too few nurses had been able to develop this strategic view, and as a result saw IT as something outside their role and influence.
She argued this needed to change as information systems start to impact on practice and the way services are shaped.
“The landscape is changing but nurses never get to put the whole thing together and consider what these changes mean for quality and patient safety, complaints and patient engagement.
“Nursing leaders need to develop their vision for what this means for services and for the workforce.”
One aim of the course is to develop a group of nurses who might be chief clinical nursing officers in the future.
Dr Hamer has studied the impact of CNIOs in the US, and was an early supporter of the EHI CCIO Campaign to encourage clinicians from all backgrounds to become chief clinical information officers.
She said: “I would love to see chief clinical nursing officers appointed in the NHS, but right now we have nowhere to pull them from. We do not have a cadre of leaders who are interested in this space. This is the pipeline.”
More immediately, the course will help participants to think about informatics not as an IT issue but as a nursing and patient care issue.
For example, she said: “When you cannot access a decision making system for an hour, this is not an IT issue but a nursing issue.”
She also wants to see senior nurses redesign job descriptions for front line staff to emphasise the role of information in quality, safety and engagement.
She said that nurses understood the contribution that information can make to patient safety. “What they resent is the burden of manual data collection. They are looking for solutions that are able to reduce that by inputting data once.”
Too many devices to support this were “clunky” and not well liked by nurses. “That’s not the fault of developers but reflects the lack of engagement by nurses in the development,” she said.
She also wants to see senior nurses working with directors of IT and IT suppliers and for senior nurses to be more engaged in procurement.
The feedback from the first course had been “brilliant” with participants reporting that they had made contact with IT directors and joined procurement projects, she added.
© 2011 EHealth Media.
The BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group are delighted to back the EHI call for clinical engagement at board level, their CCIO campaign. We have long pushed for recognition that health informatics is now an essential part of health care, and needs top level clinical involvement.
Through our work with the NHS we recognise that it is fundamentally important for IT projects to be clinically driven from the outset to ensure their success, and that’s why BT is delighted to support E-Health Insider’s campaign. Never before has there been a better time for IT to really make a difference to the NHS and the creation of this new role will ensure IT remains high on the agenda and clinically led.
It's blindingly obvious that one is needed.
Simples
The Royal College of Anaesthetists is happy to endorse the campaign for Chief Clinical Information Officers in NHS Trusts. In an environment of growing innovation for information generation in the healthcare environment, it is vital that integration of systems and coordination of effort is seen as paramount to ensure good communication and appropriate data security – the CCIO role will be vital to provide professional management and patient reassurance.
Clinical leadership of IT is essential to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and bring healthcare IT into the 21st century.
Delighted to see this campaign receive the level of support it so richly deserves from so many of the Royal Colleges and other professional groups. The change that the campaign will hopefully bring about is long overdue. Well done to EHI for organising.For what it%u219s worth, as a public health doctor and registered health informatician, I fully support the campaign.Better intelligence = better decisions = better healthDr Brendan O%u219BrienUKCHIP Level 3
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