Celebrating 27 years of uniting nurses

Nursing Education, Technology and Social Media.

Dr Sharon Vasuthevan.

Nursing Education, Technology and Social Media.

Nursing Training.

There is no way that we are going back to pre- COVID-19 days.

“By embracing tech, nurse educators will be preparing and equipping student for future trends. I always say that practice assist in education.”

Telemedicine during COVID ensured that people got their medication.

“So, I will not buy this ‘born before technology’ story”.

She says our education has to respond to that kind of environment, and that is the future.

We also have the WHO Global Strategic Directing for Nursing and Midwifery which calls for informatics nursing.

Even your highest level nurses are expected to understand this. Digital education and learning is on the increase, which underlines the essence of technology and human nursing living side by side.

CPD across the nursing spectrum is warranted, and underlines the importance of technology. Disruptive technology trends calls on us to thrive and let’s start to align our policies with the current times.

New students entering the education system are technology junkies and they are at the forefront in technology trends and they come in handy. Let’s make the learning environment accommodative of who they are what they are well-versed.

What social media applications do the students use which we need to include in our education system?

We need to become cognisant of this, because these are our customers and we need to accomodate them.

It requires our educators to be innovative. It is free, and easy to easy to use and it enhances learning.

What are some of the challenges?

We have unstable energy supply. Loadshedding is upon us.

The cost of technology doesn’t come in cheap and we have to start budgeting for it. Absence of policies and guidelines is the biggest oversight. We should have these available as part of our accreditation requirements.

This is not something that we are going to do overnight. But with gradual preparing, it is going to deliver us to where we want to be.

The curriculum of nursing education also needs to change and accomodate these changes and potential changes and computerised ways of doing things, and the education system needs to have means that counter challenges that come with technology, like guarding against plagiarism etc.

We cannot function any longer without automated technology.

If we want employers to invest in technology, they will want to look at the return on investment. And what are we going to do.

Nurse educator competency is important, just as minimum technology accomodation in our education system.

We need to take forward informatics nursing.

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