Nurses and internet health-related information: Review on access and utility by Ahmad, M. M., Musallam, R., & Allah, A. H.: Training nurses to use information technology is essential for their continuous professional development.
This article serves as an overview of the literature on nurses’ use of and access to health-related information on the Internet (HRI). The authors’ four initial goals for this paper are to investigate nurses’ use and access to HRI, determine reasons for seeking online information, recognize how nurses integrate new information technologies, and identify how nurses use available websites addressing health-related information (Ahmad et al., 2018). Muayyad and his colleagues used CINAHL, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, Springer, and Sage to conduct their research (2018).
Nurses are essential to the healthcare system because they provide various services to patients and their families. Even though nurses make up the largest group of healthcare workers in hospitals and clinics, there is little research on accessing information online. Nurses prefer to obtain HRI from colleagues and specialists rather than depending on traditional sources (Ahmad et al., 2018). As a result, effective searching tactics and recommendations that lead nurses through electronic synthesized research to pursue evidence-based health-related information are critical (Ahmad et al., 2018). Nurses believe that using online HRI helps them provide better care. Younger nurses, faculty or director roles, or higher academic degrees are more likely to use internet databases than other nurses. Nurses with a college education are more likely to utilize the Internet than nurses without a college education (Ahmad et al., 2018). However, few studies have looked into how nurses use the Internet to find work.
According to the authors, the literature presented substantial evidence of nurses’ growing use of the Internet to retrieve material linked to clinical practice (Ahmad et al., 2018). Nurses use health-related websites like journals and databases to improve their clinical judgment and treatment quality. Nurses should be trained to be efficient consumers of various professional and popular medical information sources to apply evidence-based knowledge and a variety of clinical suggestions (Ahmad et al., 2018). Nurses should also be able to direct their patients to reliable internet health-related information.
Senior nurses in administrative roles play a critical role in ensuring that hospital libraries have access to reliable and easily accessible health-related databases. There is an apparent demand for contextually relevant, dynamic, and well-organized Internet content tailored to the needs of nurses. A comprehensive evaluation of the content of the websites is essential to assure the accuracy of the accessed data when deciding which site to use in terms of ease of access, complete content, and up-to-date information (Ahmad et al., 2018). The nursing curriculum has emphasized the need to include ICT skills and use professional health-related resources to get reliable medical information. Nursing students exposed to ICT at a young age may develop more favorable attitudes and self-confidence when using computers (Ahmad et al., 2018). Nurses’ ability to find important information has improved due to their strong ICT abilities, beneficial for nurses’ interpersonal interactions and professional growth whether they used static computers, personal laptops, or smartphones (Ahmad et al., 2018). Overall the article states that it is crucial to practice nurses’ training in information technology not only for their professional development, but for improving the quality of healthcare as well.
Reference
Ahmad, M. M., Musallam, R., & Allah, A. H. (2018). Nurses and internet health-related information: Review on access and utility. Clujul Medical, 91(3), 266–273. Web.