Nurses, who are at the frontline of care, spend the most time at the bedside with the patient and are the largest professional group in the healthcare sector, yet they are often not taken seriously into account by doctors and other colleagues when it comes to driving innovation in the healthcare systems. However, nurses are by far the most innovative healthcare professionals in a highly inefficient healthcare ecosystem.
Ms Rebecca Love, a registered nurse, gave her insights on this topic in a TED Talk. She started by talking about Florence Nightingale, who revolutionized healthcare during the Crimean War by pointing out to doctors that infection was killing as many soldiers as bullets, and that hygiene in the healthcare practice had to be improved. In a similar line, nurses are, most of the time, the end-user of most medical devices. However, they are very rarely involved in these devices design – resulting in tools that are not fit-for-purpose and that increase nurses’ workload rather than decreasing it. Despite their key role for the well-functioning of healthcare systems, nurses’ shortages are acute and persisting both in the EU and in the US. This and other key insights into nursing are expressed by Rebecca’s in her up-to-the-point talk, which is available online.
The EFN, as a strong advocate of engaging frontline nurses in healthcare innovation, is involved in two EU-funded projects on Electronic Health Records: InteropEHRate and Smart4Health. In both projects, end-user co-design and cocreate is at the heart of all deliverables, ensuring deployment at the end of the projects, supporting the implementation of cross border care in the EU.