Collaborative web-based nursing practice learning system

Abstract

Nurses collaborate with other medical professionals including doctors, lab technicians, and other nurses to provide patient care. Especially, the nurses often work as a team to take care of multiple patients. However, it is fairly often for the team members to work at different time in different location as they are assigned to work in different shifts. Traditionally, the nurses keep the written patient records for the others to review and also have brief face-to-face meetings as one shift ends and the next shift starts. This process tends to be one-way communication from the nurses, who collected and/or analyzed the patient information, to other nurses in the same team without much opportunity to feedback or clarification. Although, this approach works well for the experienced nurses, the novice nurses or the nursing students in the internship settings require fairly long time to get used to it. To remedy this problem, we are developing a web-based nursing practice collaborative system, which can also act as an in-practice learning system to enable better communication and also group decision making. We designed the system to facilitate collaborative learning by a team of nurses through helping each other to work toward to achieve the goal of best nursing care. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.