Now more than ever, nurses need to be involved in technology design: lessons from the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

The global and urgent response to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced healthcare systems to broadly adopt technologies that allow care and services to shift virtually. This includes video conferencing, wearables and telemedicine applications (King, 2020; Morris, 2020; Weiss et al., 2020) lower the number of patients entering hospitals and care facilities and reduce risks of COVID-19 transmission. While reports of below normal patient capacities at many hospitals earlier on in the pandemic suggested that these technological innovations were successful in supporting healthcare institutions to meet this goal (Financial Accountability Ontario, 2018), there remains large groups of patients who require medical treatment and must be admitted to receive care from Registered Nurses during this historical pandemic. Within the context of COVID-19, clinical nurses are confronted with dire circumstances regarding rationing personal protective equipment (PPE) (World Health Organization, 2020a), staffing shortages (Fraser, 2019), burnout (Benyon, 2020) and higher risks of infection as 'more than 230,000 healthcare workers have been infected worldwide' (International Council of Nurses, 2020). Additionally, nurses are challenged with using new technologies in unique ways to provide care—such as using iPads to provide palliative care and baby monitors to safely communicate and maintain distance during a Protected Code Blue. While considerable attention is paid to the emerging health technologies…