Role-based support for intensive care nursing: a designer's perspective

Many nursing tasks primarily rely on the non-technical skills of intensive care nurses, skills which are not related directly to technical expertise, but are crucial for maintaining safety. Examples include being capable of managing the nursing process, handling stress and feeling confident about decisions, but also coping with the psychosocial consequences of working in an ICU, being able to handle difficult patients or poor team dynamics. Technical systems supporting these tasks and skills do not seem to exist yet. This thesis investigates how these non-technical tasks and skills of ICU nurses can be improved and supported by technical systems, in a way that fits the natural working methods of ICU nurses. To this end, design goals and design directions are defined for future nursing informatics applications based on insights into the actual working strategies of ICU nurses. An important feature of this approach is the introduction of a design-oriented framework for supporting ICU nursing. This framework aims to support product developers in collecting useful data by facilitating an effective discussion with ICU nursing staff about their work process and to help them come up with design implications on work support from the collected data.

M. Melles

14-6-2011 07:30:00