A new health care portal, dubbed NurseONE, is to launch in
Saskatoon in June, the result of dogged efforts by the First
Nations and Inuit Health Branch (FNIHB) of Health Canada and the
Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) to provide remote and rural
nurses with a personalized interactive web-based resource.
NurseONE hopes to advance patient safety by giving nurses access
to evidence-based information through journals and online
libraries, online development tools, and notification of public
health concerns and advisories for increased emergency
preparedness.
But none of that happened overnight, according to Barbara Oke,
executive director of the Office of Nursing Services in FNIHB.
"The portal dates back to 2002, just after the Office of Nursing
Services was created," she said. "They were going through the
exercise of developing a nursing strategy that would take them
forward for the next four years."
The information management/information technology piece of that
strategy involved discussions around a nursing portal, seen at the
time as an area where nurses could go to find the most recent
information, evidence and critical support to enhance their
practice at the community level, said Oke.
"While that work was being done at FNIHB, there was a larger
initiative at the CNA and they were talking about the same thing
for all nurses. The heads of the two organizations got together and
everyone began to see it as a win-win."
CNA took over the actual development of the portal and FNIHB
made sure their nurses and Band-employed nurses were recognized in
the development.
"There are approximately 630 First Nations reserves across
Canada and there are nurses on each one of those," Oke said. "Half
of them are direct employees of Health Canada or FNIHB and the
other half are Band-employed b those are the nurses, through the
regional offices, that we work with."
The challenge in remote communities is accessing information and
library resources, as well as having the opportunity to talk to
nurse experts on specific issues, she said. That is why NurseONE
has such a strong First Nations component as well as FNIHB
funding.
"The funding is through a contribution agreement with CNA," Oke
said. "We funded it for almost $4 million over a two-year period.
In that period the infrastructure allowing the portal to reflect
the needs of nurses in all domains had to be completed."
The clinical practice area is the most widely known, according
to Oke. But there are also nurse educators, nurse administrators or
nurse managers and nurse researchers that have to be accounted for.
There are also policy experts.
"We wanted to make sure that the portal made sense to nurses,"
she said. "The way that a researcher works is different than the
way a clinical nurse at the bedside at a community health care
centre or a nursing station works. It had to be very user
friendly."
Nurses were consulted widely throughout the entire development.
"Student nurses provided an interesting perspective because they
are going to be in our workplace of the future," Oke said.
Nurses in First Nations communities tested the portal in
February.
"Nurses had the opportunity to provide feedback and to say, 'we
like this, we don't like that, this doesn't work, or this doesn't
make sense to me,'" Oke said. "Close to 70 per cent of the nursesb
feedback was exceptionally positive, but the exciting part of it
was that we got information to make it better."
Nurses can also develop their own pages on the portal so that
the web sites they visit frequently depending on clients' needs can
be saved to their own pages and they can also develop a continuing
competency program file for themselves.
"Until now all of these things weren't necessarily available in
all places nurses worked," Oke said.
NurseONE is about decision making, according to Christophe
KervC)gant, NurseONE manager of operations at CNA.
"Nurses have to make decisions immediately, so the portal allows
them, at their fingertips, ready information in their very complex
environments," KervC)gant said. "We wanted to make sure that the
tool worked for the day-to-day needs of the nurses and it could be
inserted into a much larger strategy which is Canada-wide and
implemented by CNA."
Nurses, according to KervC)gant, are knowledge workers. NurseONE
gives them time to think critically because that's what nurses need
most.
FNIHB funded development of NurseONE in partnership with CNA and
provincial regulatory organizations.
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