Informatics in the Nursing Curriculum: A National Survey of Nursing Informatics Requirements in Nursing Curricula (Headlines from the NLN)
By Nursing Education Perspectives
- Release Date: 2008-09-01
- Genre: Education
Description
Numerous forces in the last decade have converged to form a "tipping point" demanding that nurses have the necessary knowledge and skills to practice in a technology-rich health care environment. Several Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports have highlighted the importance of health information technologies in providing safe and quality care. In particular, Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality (A. C. Greiner and E. Knebel, National Academies Press, 2003) recommends informatics as a core competency for all health care professionals. Federal initiatives spearheaded by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology also served as an impetus for preparing nurses to work with a variety of informatics tools. The TIGER Initiative and others advocate that a nurse's portfolio needs to include knowledge and skills in computer literacy, information literacy, and informatics. In 2005, the NLN Educational Technology and Information Management Advisory Council established the Task Group on Informatics Competencies to review the informatics literature and survey faculty and administrators on the extent of preparation in nursing informatics competencies in schools of nursing. The purpose of the survey was to measure the informatics-related requirements of nursing curricula and ascertain how those requirements are integrated into curricula.
