Nursing and the Electronic Health Record in Asia, Australasia, and the South Pacific

Introduction Nurses provide holistic care to patients with diverse healthcare and social requirements, within many different types of organizations and geographical locations. This can mean nurses are delivering care in isolation from their colleagues and sometimes in isolation from medical staff support. Access to information, including the patient’s previous health encounters, and to intelligent decision support are becoming essential for all healthcare providers in the modern healthcare environment. However, recent extensive research undertaken in Australia1 highlights that nurses continue to lack confidence in the use of IT. Also, nurses in this study recognized the benefits of adopting more IT in the workplace but were frustrated by the limitations of access to technology. Significantly, training in how to use various applications was very limited. These issues have also been noted in a New Zealand study.2.