Reflection on National Nurses Week & Nursing Informatics

 National Nurses Week is celebrated each year to honor those women and men who have chosen the nursing profession as a career and to highlight the many and diverse ways that nurses contribute to better patient care. You also may know nursing is the largest of the healthcare professions with more than 3.1 million registered nurses practicing in the United States.

Nurses share their talents in diverse settings, and many choose to specialize their practice and expertise in highly defined areas or types of patient care. One of the newest and rapidly growing specialties is nursing informatics. As defined by the American Nurses Association’s Nursing Informatics: Scope and Standards of Practice, it is “a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice. Nursing informatics supports patients, nurses and other providers in their decision-making in all roles and settings. This support is accomplished through the use of information technology and information structures, which organize data, information and knowledge for processing by computers.”

May 12 has been designated as Nursing Informatics Day by the American American Nurses Association and the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Community. Please view the NI Awareness Day Flyer and share with any nursing groups, members or interested parties that want to understand and learn more about this exciting profession.

On Thursday, May 12, at 11 a.m. CT, the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Community will present “Nursing Informatics 101” by Melissa F. Barthold, MSN, RN-BC, CPHIMS, FHIMSS, and Ruth MacCallum, BS, RN-BC.

Register for this complimentary event…and share your thoughts on the profession of nursing informatics – here on the HIMSS Blog.

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