Patient Care Device Technology Transformation: Nurses Seek Partners to Achieve Patient Care Excellence

Abstract

Nurses make up the largest segment of the health-care workforce worldwide (World Health Organization, 2020). Nursing is fundamentally a process of innovation, where creativity and problem-solving are leveraged to co-create optimal outcomes for each patient and family. Throughout history, nurse innovators have contributed significantly to health-care research, quality, safety, and improved outcomes. Unfortunately, nursing innovation is often not well recognized, respected, or utilized, and most patient care devices and technologies currently in use were not developed by or even with direct consultation with nurses. Nurses seek transdisciplinary partners to develop devices and technologies to transform health care and achieve optimal patient outcomes. This article highlights the experience of five nurses partnering with other disciplines to bring nursing innovations into practice, introducing a vision for patient care devices and technologies developed by a committee formed through the American Nurses Association. Sharing these experiences and vision is a call to interdisciplinary colleagues to recognize nurses’ needs, skills, and efforts - a call to partner with them to install devices and technologies into health care that can achieve patient care excellence.