New hospital tech disrupts doctors' and nurses' jobs, forces improvisation to ensure patient safety

Doctors and nurses must adapt their routines and improvise their actions to ensure continued patient safety, and for their roles to be effective and to matter as new technology disrupts their working practices.

Research from Lancaster University Management School, published in the Journal of Information Technology, found electronic patient records brought in to streamline and improve work caused changes in the division of labour and the expected roles of both physicians and nursing staff.

These changes saw disrupted working practices, professional boundaries and professional identities, often requiring complex renegotiations to re-establish these, in order to deliver safe patient care. Managers implementing these systems are often quite unaware of the unintended consequences in their drive for efficiency.

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Source: EurekAlert, 25 November 2019