ChatGPT and Large Language Models in Contemporary Nursing

Area of Science:

• Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
• Nursing Informatics
• Digital Health

Background:

• The integration of advanced AI, specifically large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, presents novel opportunities and challenges within the nursing profession.
• Understanding the multifaceted applications, benefits, limitations, and governance of LLMs is crucial for their responsible adoption in nursing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To synthesize existing evidence on the applications, benefits, limitations, and governance considerations of ChatGPT and LLMs in nursing.
• To examine LLM utility across three key domains: nursing education, clinical practice, and workflow management.

Main Methods:

• A narrative review methodology was employed, adhering to established guidance for such reviews.
• A structured literature search was conducted across Medline (PubMed), Scopus, and arXiv from January 2019 to March 2026.
• Eligible studies included peer-reviewed original research, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, narrative reviews, and expert commentaries relevant to nursing applications of LLMs.

Main Results:

• In nursing education, LLMs serve as adaptive scaffolds but pose risks to academic integrity and clinical reasoning.
• LLMs show potential in clinical practice for preliminary assessments and patient education material generation, yet exhibit performance degradation in complex scenarios and significant hallucination rates.
• For workflow management, LLMs can reduce documentation burden, but data privacy regulations like GDPR present deployment constraints.
• Cross-domain concerns include algorithmic bias, professional accountability, and the lack of clear medico-legal frameworks for AI errors.

Conclusions:

• LLMs should function as auxiliary tools augmenting, not replacing, professional nursing judgment.
• Safe and ethical integration necessitates AI literacy curricula, institutional governance, human-in-the-loop verification, and ongoing patient safety outcome evaluation.
• Nurses must actively participate in shaping the responsible adoption of generative AI in healthcare.