Digital health in the School of Nursing and Midwifery

14 Feb 2019

The use of Digital health or Information Communication Technology (ICT) in healthcare........... 

The use of Digital health or Information Communication Technology (ICT) in healthcare continues to evolve with electronic systems and devices becoming integral to healthcare in every country. This has led to an urgent need for healthcare professionals to be competent in the use of digital health technologies and the ability to critically appraise health information. While it appears there is a lack of digital health content in undergraduate nursing/midwifery curricula internationally, Dr Sile Creedon in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, UCC, delivered a module specifically on informatics/digital health to final year nursing and midwifery students. In Semester 1 (2018/2019), a group of final year undergraduate nursing, midwifery and intellectual students engaged in online and face to face lectures. They participated in online discussions, peer review and among other modular outputs, developed conference posters that focused on developing ICT solutions within the context of Key Performance Indicators in Nursing/Midwifery. The posters were displayed in November 2018 at the HISI (Health Informatics Society of Ireland) international conference in Dublin and at the School of Nursing and Midwifery’s annual conference in UCC. Meditech Ireland funded printing the posters. What they said: “I found this module to be very interesting. The lecturer was engaging and promoted discussion within the group. The main thing I took was how much we depend on informatics in health care but also how internet access can affect the running of a service” “I really enjoyed this module. The content was new, the teaching approach different, and I really felt we were getting a bird’s eye view of technology in health. This stuff is really important” “Thank you for an enjoyable and interesting module, we all really liked it”