Nursing and knowledge work: issues regarding workload measurement and the informatics nurse specialist.
The profession of nursing has been faced with questions concerning workload measurement for decades, and those concerns continue to be relevant today. Traditionally, nursing has turned to time-motion studies to study this, but there is a debate about how relevant time-motion studies are to the profession of nursing when it is viewed as knowledge work. Healthcare workers, including the nursing profession, may be the single biggest group of knowledge workers. Knowledge workers today represent a significantly different workforce than are the workers of the past. Informatics, as a specialty, is relatively new to the nursing profession and continually evolving. As more nurses enter informatics and function as informatics nurse specialists, they will continue to be in the group of knowledge workers whose observable input and output is difficult to measure. Today's healthcare leaders, managers, and administrators need to identify an appropriate method of workload measurement for knowledge workers.
Windsor
Jason
J
Army Nurse Corps, Outpatient Clinical Systems and Training, Tripler Army Medical Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D048108:Nursing Informatics; D014481:United States; D016526:Workload