Strengthening nursing education in the era of digital health

As digital health technologies, such as electronic health records, become increasingly prevalent and more advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, machine learning, predictive analytics, algorithms, genomics, precision medicine, robotics, and virtual reality are integrated into health systems, there is a growing need to enhance the digital capabilities of the healthcare workforce. This is particularly important in light of the World Health Organization's Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025, which emphasises the importance of developing a digitally capable health workforce to strengthen health systems. 

The inevitability of care digitalisation calls for a proactive and comprehensive approach to digital health education that goes beyond basic technical proficiency skills. Nurses, as the largest group of healthcare providers, play a critical role in the digital transformation of healthcare. It is essential to enhance their readiness and education in digital health to ensure effective, safe, and efficient patient care with the support of existing and emerging digital health technologies. This education also enables nurses to actively contribute to the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of digital health technologies and services they use in their everyday practice. 

While the nursing profession has made significant progress in enhancing nurses' digital capabilities through nursing informatics competency requirements, challenges still exist. Existing nursing informatics competency frameworks guide nursing educators in teaching nursing informatics and inform nursing practice with technology. However, these frameworks often lack indicators for nursing roles involving emerging technologies and fail to address digital health as an evolving care model. 

Furthermore, the integration of digital health concepts and nursing informatics content in nursing curricula is limited due to the lack of content experts available to teach digital health and nursing informatics. This highlights the need to conduct a scoping review to gather and analyse studies on digital health education and training interventions for nursing students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. By identifying gaps in the literature, the scoping review aims to inform the development of future educational interventions, strengthen nursing curricula in digital health, and provide directions for future research in this field. 

The scoping review protocol is available in the July 2023 issue of JBI Evidence Synthesis.  

Digital health education and training for undergraduate and graduate nursing students: a scoping review protocol

Kleib, Manal; Arnaert, Antonia; Nagle, Lynn M.; Ali, Shamsa; Idrees, Sobia; Kennedy, Megan; da Costa, Daniel

JBI Evidence Synthesis 21(7):p 1469-1476, July 2023. | DOI: 10.11124/JBIES-22-00266