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From the Editor
This is the Winter 2007 issue of NI News - the quarterly free ezine from the site Nursing Informatics.com.
This publication offers articles, news, product and systems analyses, tech resources and dialogue on global nursing informatics issues, discoveries and theory. We will provide a comprehensive view of informatics in practice, education, research and administration.
If you would like to receive a regular copy, please go HERE to subscribe.
June Kaminski
Read the OJNI -
The Online Journal of
Nursing Informatics
Go to OJNI
As Editor in Charge of Virtual Nursing Practice and Culture, I invite you to submit your research and other papers related to using the online environment as a nursing context for OJNI publication.
 Canadian?
Join the CNIA!
As President-Elect, I also invite you to join the Canadian Nursing Informatics Association at cnia.ca
Canadian Journal of Nursing Informatics
New Issue coming out this month!
An active call for papers, essays, reviews, columns, or other creative or practical work related to the world of nursing informatics is out - why not contribute?
OFFICIAL CALL
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The Revealing of
Nursing Informatics
...Exploring the Field
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As part of my PhD work, I wrote a comprehensive analysis of nursing informatics using a variety
of critical, social and philosophical lens.
Over the past four decades, the field of informatics has become the focus of a large body of research, theory development and scrutiny across most disciplines. In order to address both the visible and hidden aspects and nuances of informatics in nursing, a complex review of the literature was necessary. As this review was conducted, several emergent themes became clear.
Each theme contributed to a wide angle lens of the implications, barriers, benefits, processes, and danger signs that accompanied the adoption of information technologies into nursing and other disciplinary arenas. For the purpose of this comprehensive examination, these themes have been fashioned into a conceptual framework that focuses on seven significant perspectives of informatics: antithesis, artifact, utility, technique, agency, networks, and power. All seven of these views present an unique yet interwoven body of analysis that helps to shape the experience and adoption of nursing informatics when applied to the context of nursing practice, education, research, and administration
The theme, Antithesis refers to ideas presented in the literature that purport that the use of computers and other information technologies in health care is a threat: in fact it is the antithesis or opposite of providing compassionate, caring and client-centered nursing care.
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The Artifact view refers to the notion that technology of all kinds, including the contemporary inclusion of information technologies in nursing is an inherent, almost seamless cultural phenomenon, one that is long-standing and can be taken for granted as part of nursing evolution. Utility literature presents information technologies as simple, benign, and useful tools that nurses control and apply to their practice, research, studying, and management activities. The concept of Technique focuses on the application of information technologies in nursing aimed to boost productivity and efficiency, promote best practices and evidenced-based practice, and concretely record nursing activities electronically.
A focus on Agency incorporates actor-network theory, technological agency in its' own right, and how nurses interact with ICTs in an interactive and intense, almost reciprocal way. The notion of Networks entails an examination of the application of information technologies in a collaborative way: in interactions with other people, such as colleagues, interdisciplinary team members, clients, and communities of practice and inquiry, sometimes on a global scale. Finally, the theme of Power will be investigated from a disciplinary perspective, including the consequences of prestige, influence, legitimacy, governmentality, and social access. Together, these seven themes provide a rich, sometimes discordant yet crucial analysis of the varied philosophical and active ways that information technology and informatics are enacted and applied in the nursing arena.
Read Entire Work....
Go to News on page 2 |
The full work is available online at:
http://www.nursing-informatics.com/revealing/introduction.html
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