A survey study of nursing contributions to medication management with special attention to health information technology

Abstract

Little detail is known about the types of activities intensive care unit (ICU) nurses perform to support medication management in ICUs in order to contribute to patient safety and quality of care. To understand nurses’ perceptions of the frequency and importance of medication management activities, including those related to using health information technologies (IT). A survey was developed, pilot tested, and administered to ICU nurses in two hospitals. Nurses perceived that they dealt with health IT problems infrequently and that those problems were only moderately important to patient care. Nurses perceived that they engaged in complex cognitive activities frequently and that those were highly important to patient care. Despite considerable focus on health IT problems in extant literature, this study found that nurses do not perceive these problems as frequent or very important. Instead, this study highlights the important role of complex cognitive activities for high quality nursing care, which is a departure from the simplistic notion that nurses only engage in prescribed nursing tasks. Importantly, the survey can be used to identify activities that are value and non-value added, which may lead to better tailored interventions to support nursing work.

Keywords:

• Nursing
• critical care
• medication management
• health information technology
• human factors

Acknowledgments

This study was funded by grant 61148 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to PC, BK and Dr. Mary Ellen Murray, and by a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (1 R01 HS013610) to BK. The first author was additionally funded by the Graduate Engineering Research Scholars (GERS) program of UW–Madison. The research team would like to thank the participating hospitals, nurses, nurse managers who made this research possible.

Work completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA.*Corresponding author