Remembering the basics: Administrative technology and nursing care in a hospital emergency department

This article discusses findings from qualitative research conducted with nurses in a hospital Emergency Department. It explores nurses’ attitudes towards a patient care information system (PCIS) installed by hospital management in an effort to improve patient care through more effective “data sharing”. Nurses’ definitions of care are examined vis-à-vis their perceptions of administrative tasks and technologies like the PCIS. Efforts are made to link the system with wider patterns of administrative technology acquisition in health care and users’ everyday/night experiences of using these technologies. The article also presents key themes from a literature review of recent case studies about information technology implementation in nursing.Results show that nurses choose to define care in a way that highlights relationship building and physical/emotional connectedness between nurse and patient. The article contends that nurses’ refusal to incorporate technology-enabled “data sharing” into their definitions of care is indicative of efforts to make visible their caring work, often rendered invisible by the feminization of care. The article concludes by reaffirming the importance of ‘remembering the basics’, i.e., patient care is rooted in the skilled practice of individual caregivers, not in data sharing.