Developing nurse educators' computer skills towards proficiency in nursing informatics

The purpose of this paper is to assess nurse educators' competence development in nursing informatics (NI) and to compare their competence to the NI competence of other healthcare professionals. Electronic health records (EHR) have been in use for many years. However, the adoption of the nursing care plan finally made it possible for nurses in Finland to develop a model for structured documentation with nursing terminology. A total of n = 124 (n = 85 pre-test and n = 39 post-test) participants from Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS), hospitals, hospitals' information management and health centres were surveyed with a e-questionnaire designed to assess the development of their NI competences during the nursing documentation development project. The questionnaire included 145 structured questions and 6 open questions. Data analysis focused on classification and comparison of NI competences through data description and statistical parameters using figures and tables. The basic NI competences of the nurse educators were good at the end of project and the nurse educators had better information literacy and information management competences than other participants. The information retrieval skills varied greatly, but they improved evenly towards the end. The nurse educators mastered better evidence-based nursing and use of nursing process models in their work.