McConnell EA; International Society of Technology Assessment in Health Care. Meeting.

Abstr Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Meet. 1993; 9: 40.

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Nursing, Lubbock.

Registered nurses are the patients "link with the personal, human world within an impersonal, electronic world" (Rowan, 1966). The number and complexity of medical devices used in direct care are increasing exponentially. Medical devices exclusive to intensive care units are now common on general nursing units, while devices once confined to acute care settings are now routine in the outpatient clinic and in the home. As the key users of medical devices in the direct care of patients, nurses are the interface between patients and medical devices used on their behalf. Nurses combine the caring and humanistic values of nursing with the technological values associated with the medical devices they use in direct care. The staff nurse must not only understand the patient problem requiring the use of a medical device and the mechanism by which it interacts with the patient, but also safely operate the device and recognize the patient's response to it (Carnevali, 1985). Equally important, the nurse must skillfully combine these technical skills with humanistic values. The ability to incorporate the humanistic values reflected in caring with medical device use depends, in part, on knowledgeable and proficient device use. Such use hinges on device education, the nature and quality of which can vary widely. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the medical devices used in patient care adversely affect patients and nurses and promote the polarization of technology and humanistic values. This paper describes the nature of the human-machine interface in clinical nursing practice and suggests areas of research, the results of which, would facilitate the marriage of humanistic and technological values in clinical nursing practice. Equally important, it explores the suggestion that there are "distinctive nursing technologies which have been 'simply' (been) relegated to an invisible or at least partially opaque world" (Hickson, 1992).

Publication Types:

• Meeting Abstracts

Keywords:

• Empathy
• Humanism
• Humans
• Intensive Care Units
• Nurses
• ethics
• instrumentation
• nursing
• hsrmtgs

Other ID:

• HTX/94906256

UI: 102211435

From Meeting Abstracts