Learning how to use new health care technology is a complex challenge, and success hinges on high-level support at any organization, according to nurses, vendors, and other experts who attended the AAMI Foundation’s first Industry Council meeting.
This diverse group – which included representatives from BD (formerly CareFusion), Connexall, Hospira (a Pfizer company), Masimo, and Medtronic, as well as patient safety advocates and health care professionals – met recently at AAMI’s headquarters in Arlington, Virgina, to discuss the current state of training, identify challenges, and describe what they would like to see in the future.
“Devices have become more interconnected and complex,” said Mary Logan, president of AAMI and the AAMI Foundation. “However, the training models we are using are based on the past. If we started from scratch today, based on the current clinical environment, we would not be training nurses in the same way.”
Nursing is a very device-heavy discipline. According to Peter Doyle, instructional design program manager at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, there has been a 23 percent increase in device types at his institution over the past four years, and many of these devices have different makes, models, and software versions.
Learning everything about every device just isn’t feasible, according to the nursing representatives, who point to increasing demands on their time, which makes it very hard to even attend training sessions. Additionally, there is an entrenched cultural desire in nursing to focus on the patient, not technology. Finally, they noted, there are limits to how much any one person can learn and retain.
Breaking information into “small digestible bites” is a strategy Maria Cvach, a registered critical care nurse and director of policy management and integration at Johns Hopkins Hospital has used with success. In her experience, once people become comfortable with one concept you can then build on it, slowly adding to their repertoire.
Everyone around the table agreed that getting the C-suite to understand the importance of training was essential.
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