Telenursing

What does this for us? Can this help us in our health? Lets find out.

       Telenursing is the use of “technology to deliver nursing care and conduct nursing practice”. Although the use of technology changes the delivery medium of nursing care and may necessitate competencies related to its use to deliver nursing care, the nursing process and scope of practice does not differ with telenursing. Nurses engaged in telenursing practice continue to assess, plan, intervene, and evaluate the outcomes of nursing care, but they do so using technologies such as the Internet, computers, telephones, digital assessment tools, and telemonitoring equipment.

      One of the most distinctive telenursing applications is home care. For example, patients who are immobilized, or live in remote or difficult to reach places, citizens who have chronic ailments, or disabilitating diseases, etc., may stay at home and be "visited" and assisted regularly by a nurse via videoconferencing, internet, videophone, etc. Still other applications of home care are the care of patients in immediate post-surgical situations, the care of wounds, ostomies, handicapped individuals, etc. In normal home health care, one nurse is able to visit up to 5-7 patients per day. Using telenursing, one nurse can “visit” 12-16 patients in the same amount of time.

        A common application of telenursing is also used by call centers operated by managed care organizations, which are staffed by registered nurses who act as case managers or perform patient triage, information and counseling as a means of regulating patient access and flow and decrease the use of emergency rooms.

    Telenursing can also involve other activities such as patient education, nursing teleconsultations, examination of results of medical tests and exams, and assistance to physicians in the implementation of medical treatment protocols.

          Although they are not the focus of this review, these disciplines are selectively included here for two reasons: (1) the safety issues associated with care delivered using electronic and telecommunications technologies are more similar than they are different among the various health disciplines, and (2) the dearth of research on safety and quality in the telenursing literature led the authors to include important research in other health disciplines. By including the research findings on safety and quality from varied health disciplines, the body of telenursing knowledge is expected to expand.