Building digital tools into person centred care

Our Person Centred Care event, in partnership with Elsevier, was packed with brilliant nurses, and the air was buzzing with conversation.  Attendees were also able to try Elsevier’s ClinicalKey product, helping to bring the session to life. 

The first speaker was Prof Gemma Stacey, Associate Dean for Practice at Nottingham Trent University who brilliantly described the intersection of compassionate, individualised care, digital transformation and the preferences, needs and values of patients.

After making the case for a person centred approach for digital change, Gemma explored how digital tools can both help and hinder, querying how we can square the need that professionals have for connection to the people they provide care for. 

Gemma left us with a call to action: 

“Person-centred care is too valuable to be left to technologists alone. As nurse leaders, you must be architects, of our digital future. Challenge every system, every interface, every algorithm with one essential question: “Does this enhance or diminish the human connection at the heart of caring?”

Opportunities and pitfalls

The view from the floor

• Attendees wanted the development of a proper definition of what person centred care should look like, which fed into the design of a care process to deliver it, which was subsequently baked it into the tech – and for this to be done in a way that helped to address inequalities. For example culturally sensitive pathways, or processes that specifically recognised and addressed the worse maternal outcomes experienced by black and brown women.
• Digital isn’t necessarily the problem, instead digital has highlighted that some documentation approaches used in nursing are little more than lists of minimum tasks, leaving little time or space for person centred care. 
• There was a worry that newly qualified nurses might be socialised into a care model that wasn’t providing them with good enough opportunity to develop critical thinking and clinical judgement in the live environment 
• Lots of discussion about how to ease the burden of documentation from nurses, to release time for care, whether through ambient scribe technology or through patients completing some information themselves, where they can 
• We also heard some challenging realities from attendees about the impact that documentation was having on the profession and why nurses might not be practicing person centred care now.
• Digital nurses are sometimes being left to deal with some really big practice and model of care issues alone, as they work to deliver tech enabled change. In one organisation qualified nurses were taking unqualified bank shifts so they can spend more time with patients, because the documentation burden is lower, and in another an increase in unwitnessed falls highlighted the impact of reduced nursing time spent with patients.
• We heard how nurses might sometimes be deterred from the deeper interactions with patients that are essential for person centred care, because of the emotional burden, for them and for the person they are caring for. Professional Nurse Advocates were held up as positive development and potential solution, supporting reflective practice, professional development and helping to build resilience.