At the end of Tuesday afternoon, a workshop was held titled ‘Developing nursing informatics globally: the Croatian, Cuban and South African experiences and some issues for future IMIA-NI activity’. Unfortunately, several of the planned presenters were unable to be present; Yoadis from Cuba was unable to get the NI2006, as was the case with Nolwazi from South Africa. Patti Abbott, from the USA, was feeling unwell and unable to participate. Nevertheless, with a reasonably sized audience, Robyn Carr, Aleksandar Radenovic and Peter Murray provided an overview of the issues affecting the countries mentioned in the title.
Robyn Carr, incoming Chair of IMIA-NI, did a superb job of moderating the session, and gave some background to her visits to South Africa to work with Nolwazi and colleagues. Aleksandar Radenovic gave an overview of the status of nursing and nursing informatics in Croatia, and ofr some of the issues that currently influence the development, or lack of development, of nursing informatics in his country. He identified lack of education opportunities at post-graduate level as one major issue, a theme echoed in the presentation about the situation in Cuba.
While Yoadis from Cuba was not able to be present, she did provide some presentation slides; Peter Murray spoke to these slides which summarised some of the history of health informatics and nursing infofrmatics in Cuba, and some of the issues facing the development of nursing informatics. Again, need for education was highlighted as an issue; Peter also commented on some of the issues from the perspective of his visits to Cuba. He also provided a summary of the current work he and colleagues (particularly Graham Wright and Helen Betts) from CHIRAD and University of Winchester in the UK are undertaking with Walter Sisulu University in South Africa in the development of a Masters in Health Informatics.
Peter Murray
Technorati Tags: nursing informatics, Croatia, South Africa, NI2006
The conference Gala Dinner was held on the Tuesday evening (when Korea were playing their first match in the worldcup). The dinner was soup, salad, steak and a mouse & quite pleasant (although they had problems with deleagtes who were vegetarian or on Gluten free diets etc). The wine (possibly rice wine) didn’t taste too good to some western palates & alternative wine/beer had to be purchased at high prices.
Kathleen Smith and Carol J. Bickfordled this workshop and started by getting everyone to introduce themselves & saying what they wanted to get out of it.
They got delegates into groups to look at case studies which brought out lots of experiences and ideas for the future, and triggered further questions. Kathleen and Carolprovided references and concluded with some questions and discussion.
After my own presentation on the use of ICT to support students in practice - which I will let someone else comment on - I attended a presentation by 
During the cnfernce I had asked various key people from 
Tuesday morning started with a keynote presentation by 
She concluded by considering clinical cognition and the implications for informatis and plugged a chapter in a recent book on