Definition and Scope of Nursing Informatics
Nurses were collecting data long before computers arrived. Informatics is what you do with it.
It is 2 a.m. on a busy medical ward in Enugu. In one shift, a single nurse may record dozens of temperatures, pulse rates and blood pressures, chart every drug given, note who vomited and who slept, and pass all of it on at handover. Now multiply that by every nurse, on every ward, every night, in every hospital in Nigeria.
That is a mountain of data. The question this course answers is simple: how do we turn that mountain into better care?
Historical Background of Nursing Informatics
Long before anyone owned a laptop, nurses were the people who watched, counted and wrote things down. Florence Nightingale is remembered for her lamp, but in the 1850s she was also a brilliant statistician. During the Crimean War she collected death figures from army hospitals, and showed in her famous "rose" diagrams that far more soldiers were dying from preventable infections than from battle wounds. Her numbers changed hospital sanitation for good.
So nursing has always been an information profession. What changed is the tool. The ward register, the observation chart and the paper drug chart are slowly giving way to tablets, electronic records and phone apps. The skill of using those tools wisely has a name.
Definitions of Nursing Informatics
The word informatics simply means the science of information: how it is collected, stored, processed, shared and used. Put nursing in front of it and you get a specialty that sits where three fields meet: nursing science, computer science and information science.
The classic definition, still the most widely quoted, comes from Judith Graves and Sheila Corcoran (1989). They described nursing informatics as a combination of computer science, information science and nursing science designed to assist in the management and processing of nursing data, information and knowledge to support the practice of nursing and the delivery of nursing care.
The American Nurses Association (ANA) later added a fourth word to the chain, wisdom. Its 2008 and 2015 definitions describe nursing informatics as a specialty that integrates nursing science with information and analytical sciences to identify, define, manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice.
The ANA's current Scope and Standards (3rd edition, 2022) gives a shorter version: nursing informatics is the specialty that transforms data into needed information and leverages technologies to improve health and health care equity, safety, quality and outcomes.
| Source | Key words to remember | What it emphasises |
|---|---|---|
| Graves and Corcoran (1989) | computer science + information science + nursing science; data, information, knowledge | The three sciences that combine |
| ANA (2008, 2015) | identify, define, manage, communicate; data, information, knowledge and wisdom | The full DIKW chain |
| ANA (2022) | transforms data into needed information; leverages technologies; equity, safety, quality, outcomes | The purpose: better, fairer care |
Pause & think
A ward manager says: "We don't need informatics, we don't even have computers." What would you tell her?
The Informatics Nurse and the Informatics Nurse Specialist
The ANA describes two levels. An informatics nurse is a registered nurse with an interest or experience in informatics. An informatics nurse specialist is a registered nurse with formal graduate education in informatics, who leads projects such as choosing or setting up an electronic record system.
But every nurse is an informatics user. When you enter vital signs into a tablet, look up a drug in an app or check a lab result online, you are part of the information chain, and the quality of your data decides the quality of everyone's decisions downstream.
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