Blogging NI2006. The 9th International Congress on Nursing Informatics. Seoul, Korea June 2006

UPDATE of 28 December 2006: The blog is now frozen and will not take further comments. Look out for further blogs from the hi-blogs.info ‘krew’. Also, please note that as I have moved to a new hosting provider, some of the original functionality and links may no longer be here.

The main NI2006 conference is now over, as is the associated post-conference event. I will post something about the post-conference when I get back home, but I am uploading this from Incheon Airport, Seoul, as I wait for my flight.

Many thanks to everyone who has already looked at the blog, and provided posts and comments and photos. Thanks in particular to Rod Ward and Karl Oyri.

There is still plenty of opportunity to add comments to existing posts, and for bloggers to add their reflections on the event, once they get home.

If you have photos you would like to share, please email me on peterjmurray[at]gmail.com to discuss (don’t just send them to me) - and I will be happy to work something out.

If you are reading this for the first time (especially if you were at NI2006), please let your friends and colleagues know about this blog.

Peter Murray

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The final event of the conference was the closing ceremony which included thanks to everyone who had been involved. Prizes were presented to the winners amongst the student papers and the hand over from Heather Strachen to Robyn Carr as the chair if IMIA-NI.

The team, from the Finnish Nurses Assocation, who will be providing the next NI conference in Helsinki, Finland in June 2009 invited delegtes to their country - further details are available from http://www.ni2009.org/ where further details will be made available as the next conference approaches.

There was also an invitation to the Medinfo Conference to be held August 20 - 24, 2007 Brisbane Australia.

Delegates then set off to travel home to all corners of the world, but I’m sure that many news friends and collaborations will have been formed which will continue by email.

NI2006, closing ceremony, Medinfo 2007, NI2009

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The final keynote presentation was given by Dame June Clark - with a title of “The impact of ICT on health, healthcare, and nursing in the next 20 years”. June tried to draw together many of the themes of the conference in her consideration of where we are now and where we might be going.

NI2006, healthcare futures

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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

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Ulrich Schrader, from University of Appllied Sciences, Frankfurt, Germany this afternoon gave a paper on migration of nursing informatics teaching materials to an open source learning management system.

At his institution in 1999, students wanted information available on the Internet, including study materials. The first phase (1999) was the development of a dedicated website which was a collection of learning materials, and was developed using Frontpage. He found that there were drawbacks in maintaining access restrictions. He found that communication was restricted to simple uploads and downlaods of information.

In the second phase (2000-01), he moved to using a content management system as he wanted to be able to access and update/change materials from anywhere as opposed to the restrictions of the previous system. He still found little support for interaction, and was interested in moving to use of problem-based learning.

Phase 3 (2002-03) involved use of a learning management system, which incorporated much more interaction.

He eventually found Moodle (www.moodle.org) and was able to install it on commercial, low-cost webspace and has the advantages of being open source. The first installation was in 2002, and the application was reliable and stable; he was able to move materials to Moodle incrementally. The change to a problem-based approach was made easier.

The university has now moved to Moodle as its official learning management system, supporting 150 courses. Ulrich described the use of a bottom-up ‘promoter’ model for change, as opposed to a traditional top-down institutional change approach. Other advantages of the approach he adopted were that there was little up-front investment needed during the ‘proof of concept’ phase.

Technorati Tags: Moodle, NI2006, e-leqarning, learning management

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The IMIA-NI Open Source Nursing Informatics Working Group (OSNI - www.osni.info) held a meeting this lunchtime at NI2006. The meeting has not been well attended (6 members were present), possibly due to the room being changed at the last minute. The group discussed its activities over the past year and started to think about future activities. Further information and news will be available on the OSNI website.

Karl Oyri has taken on the role of Chair of OSNI.

OSNI meeting:

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I managed to get to several papers in the “Education for Consumers and Healthcare professionals” theme.

Cyndalynn Tilley described the “evaluation of a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) module for a patient controlled analgesia pump” in which she described a small study, in which she had lots of statistics showing positive learning experiences and responses to the program - but also described problems with running the software on different computers. In her introduction she talked about this as a potential way to reduce costs of education - however her study did not address this aspect.

Diane Skiba presented a paper on behalf of a team of authors describing a partnership between a School of Nursing in the  USA and McKesson (software vendor). Outputs included the I-Collaboratorium and Webinares by McKesson staff to faculty graduate students who do not need to attend the campus at any point in their courses.

The final paper was by I-Chun Lin, a gradtuate student from Taiwan, who described an evaluation of the Formosan e-Medical School (FeMS) web based courses for nurses.

NI2006, nursing informatics, nursing education

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Following Roy’s keynote presentation the conference has now really got under way with over 700 delegates and 6 or seven parrallel sessions taking place at anytime - therefore your conference bloggers can only report on a few of the papers! If anyone else can offer comments on he other presentations please sign up so that you can post your reports on here for others to read.

There are various exhibitors with stands in the foyer area, where coffee is served, and which seems to be serving as a general chatting area. Also around the conference centre, generally on balconies etc are a range of posters exhibiting work from all over the world which seem to be attracting lots of interest from the delegates.

NI2006, posters

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Aleksandar Radenovic, from the Croatian Nursing Informatics Association (CroNIA), opened one of the first parallel sessions of the morning with a talk about the use of open source software for e-learning. He talked a little about the issues of nursing and informatics in Croatia.

Among the issues he discussed were the platform independence of the system developed, and that minimum financial resources were needed for development. Among the problems identified were that many nurses did not have good computer literacy and many had problems of Internet access from home, and this lead to 45% of students not completing the first course developed.

There are 30,000 nurses in Croatia and 10 schools of nursing. Nurses need to collect continuing education credits.

Aleksandar Radenovic:

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Monday morning started with a welcome from Nancy Lorenzi (IMIA President) who introduced the keynote speaker Roy L. Simpson from the Cerner Corporation to talk about “Coherent Heterogenicity: Redifining nursing in a consumer smart world”.

He started with lots of thanks to others. Then started talking about how life began & how species evolved - as an example of adaptation into a cost and information based healthcare system. He argued that today’s society is about Globalism and technology.
The context of modern healthcare, worldwide, including transmissable diseases and an ageing population was presented. With points being made about the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare and insurance in the USA. Access issues, especially socio-economic status, and shortage of expert healthcare professionals exemplifying current difficulties.

The diverse and expert informed patients are demanding respect and power, using the internet & therefore nursing needs to adapt to the new world. The focused on the Dodos and dinosaurs who couldn’t find their ecological niche, and described how patients/consumers have evolved & health care now needs to clean up it’s act.

He argued that nursing was inefficient, uninformed, disconnected, complacent and unnacountable - and needs to show how it provides benefit. It needs a mission, a means and some magic. “Nursing needs to speak for patients and ourselves” - using technology systems. Nurses need to hang on to CARE which the computers can not do, but use all their capabilities to enhance practice and reduce errors, and move to symbiosis in healthcare.

He finished by talking about a purple ribbon with a golden pin to represent the stregth, compassion and future of nursing.

He took some questions, including what should we do in the next two weeks to bring the magic & he suggested we go back to our patients. The magic theme was continue with a question about what nursing education could do to bring the magic to students - is this “stuff the speaker day?” he answered that we need to recognise the new student.
NI2006, consumerism, nursing nformatics

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