Nursing Informatics: Competency Challenges for Nursing Faculty

Abstract

Nursing is the largest workforce in health care with nurses increasingly required to work with digital health technologies. However, despite the adoption of nursing informatics in Australia in the mid-1980s, nursing graduates are not being adequately equipped to use these technologies in a way that benefits the profession and improves patient care. Using a scoping review approach, this paper presents an analysis of contemporary published literature and describes the barriers to faculty engagement with digital health technologies in undergraduate nursing education. Thirty five articles were included and identified faculty lack of understanding of nursing informatics and resistance to technologies, limited infrastructure and expenditure, and limited educational resources and best practice recommendations as significant barriers to the integration of nursing informatics into undergraduate nursing curricula. Recommendations for faculty development will be explored.