Supporting clinical staff and improving patient outcomes with technology

NEWS - CiLN

Erin Bensley is an Informatics Nurse Specialist at St George’s Hospital in Christchurch. She is involved in a diverse range of continuous quality improvement projects - anything that involves an information system. Here she talks about her role, her past and current projects, and why she believes you should belong to the Clinical Informatics Leadership Network.

When I started working at St George's Hospital as a registered nurse, I was very excited to see the patient acuity and workload management tool - Trendcare (before it was being used in DHBs throughout New Zealand). In my previous role I had developed a paper-based acuity tool to help standardise and ensure fairness and transparency in patient acuity and nurse allocation, all the while considering the lack of technology available to support clinical practice. This is where my journey of exploring how technology could support clinical staff and contribute to improved outcomes for patients started. I attended a HINZ conference first in 2014, the same year I commenced post graduate education, the combination of building networks and formal education leading to this role.

The most recent project we have been working on is the development and implementation of the digital medical record, a significant project for any organisation and one that has the benefit of exposing more nursing and midwifery staff to health informatics. As we look forward and consider the Hira programme, there may be challenges for the private sector. We need to ensure we are working towards all information systems supporting collection of quality data that enables the easy sharing of information with those that should have it and in a way that can be used with confidence. This all must be done ensuring protection of information.

Working in health informatics in small organisations can be both challenging and rewarding. You may not currently be working in direct patient care and you are also likely the only clinical person working in health informatics. I would recommend networks such as the Clinical Informatics Leadership Network (CiLN) to anybody considering or actually working in this area, or if you have an interest - access to other clinicians across different organisations has been invaluable. Nurses and midwives have so much to offer in these spaces and we must continue to encourage and develop this workforce.

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