Brainy nurses
December 8, 2010 -- Nurses carry information in their heads -- a lot of it! How do they remember everything they need to remember? They use their brains! This sounds silly but what nurses mean by the term "brain" is the piece of paper they carry in their pocket on which they keep track of the zillion patient and task details their job demands. (Sharon McLane, MS, MBA, RN-BC, and now PhD of the University of Texas at Houston documented this in her 2009 PhD dissertation, Understanding Nurse Created Cognitive Artifacts. "Cognitive artifact" is a fancy term for that piece of paper.) I collect brains and you can see my collection in my brain museum. Each brain is in its own way clever and meets its nurse-creator's memory needs. Fascinating... and brainy! |
|
Dan Keller's Nursing, Health Policy & Healthcare Technology Blog
Nursing Informatics · Clinical Perspectives · Healthcare Systems
"The United States alone [among wealthy countries] treats health care as a commodity to be distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a social service to be distributed according to medical need." — JAMA (2003), 290, 798