Identifying gaps between current and expected ICT competencies of nurses in Serbia

Introducing of ICT in the health care system in Serbia started 19 years ago and systematic training of nurses and technicians has not been realized yet. The primary objective of this paper is to determine the gap between the sets of ICT competencies of nurses and technicians acquiring education and experience and the necessary skill set required for their daily work. The qualitative research included questioning of the focus group of experts and 400 nurses and technicians employed in secondary and tertiary health institutions in Serbia. Based on the analysis of existing literature we choose the Informatics competencies for nurses at four levels of practice (Staggers, Gassert, Curran, 2001), and for the purposes of this study, we used a list of competencies of the first, and partially of the second and third level. At the start, the group of 12 experts had the task to eliminate some of listed competencies to express the subjective expectations of the ICT competencies of nurses. After that nurses and medical technicians were expected to grade, by Likert scale, their level of knowledge and skills for each of the 39 competencies, respectively. The answers were analyzed using measure of central tendency and distribution of results was done by median. Comparison of perceived competence of the nurses and the desired/expected level by managers shows that there is difference in 25 of the 39 offered statements. Managers expect that nurses are great users of administrative applications for staff scheduling and for maintaining employee records, while nurses declared that these programs they use relatively poorly or not at all. The larger gap is also observed when it comes to computer skill for documenting patient care--experts expect that nurses do it well, and nurses, again, estimate that their documentation skills are relatively poor. The same situation is with use of ICT for patient education. It can be concluded that further training is required in the field of ICT, either through additional training in the workplace, either through formal education. Due to the fact that ICT competencies are becoming part of the basic, functional sets, it should be considered the correction of curricula of secondary schools for nurses.