Report of activities to EFMI Council
For the period August 2001 to July 2002
Presented on August 25th 2002, EFMI Council meeting, Budapest
by Patrick Weber, Chairman of the working group
Email: patrick.weber@nicecomputing.ch

Selection of members

Some persons have announced their interest to join the group. They are invited to come to Budapest, where we will have an election meeting.

Vice president and secretary

We will have this year the election of the vice president and the secretary. The persons here below working having this function ad interim are ready to continue.

Objectives of the group

• To support nurses and nursing organizations in the European countries with information and contacts and the field of informatics
  
  
• To offer nurses opportunities to build contact networks within the informatics field. This could be accomplished by arranging sessions, workshops and tutorials in connection with the Medical Informatics European (MIE) conferences or by arranging separate meetings.
  
  
• To support the education of nurses with respect to informatics and computing.
  
  
• To support research and developmental work in the field and promote publishing of achieved results.

Recent activities
The last 2 events of the NursIE are the following:

• Working group meeting in London 2001.
  
  
• Active presentation in Nicosia spring 2002.

Preparation of a tutorial and a workshop in Budapest together with IMIA (International Medical Informatics Association) SIG-NI (Special Interest Group Nursing Informatics) a big effort of coordination was made between us and also with Hungarian Nurses. Hungarian Ministry of Health is taking an active part allowing nurses to participate at the tutorial.

Several county's members of our WG are directly involved into developments corresponding to our aims please look at country reports on the Website www.nicecomputing.ch/nieurope

European Federation of Medical Informatics
Working Group 5 Report for
Republic of Ireland 2002

The Irish Nursing Informatics Group is a subgroup of the Healthcare Informatics Society of Ireland (HISI). Three nurses represent nursing interests within HISI. They are, Rita Collins Lecturer in Nursing at University College Dublin, Rosaleen Murnane, Nurse co-ordinator of Computer, Management and Information Services, Mater Misericordiae University Hospital Dublin and Anne Sheridan, Assistant Director of Nursing, Planning and Development Unit, Eastern Regional Health Authority. The focus of HISI is
· To develop and disseminate knowledge of the use of informatics in health care.
· To promote research and education in health care informatics.
· To participate internationally with bodies of similar interests.

With these aims in mind the Nursing Interest Group work to maintain a broad focus to their scope of activities while ensuring that nursing and nurses are supported to participate in developing the profession and continuing to contribute to any healthcare initiatives that involve nursing. During the past year the nursing group organised to host a parallel session addressing nursing issues during the annual HISI conference held this year on November 15th 2001.

This years annual nursing seminar was held on May 16th and addressed "Information in Practice". Four speakers addresses this topic. The group also presented a submission to the Health Strategy 2001 "Quality and Fairness".

Ireland is awaiting the publication of a national health Information Strategy which is hoped to give guidelines and support to the development of Healthcare Informatics in our country. It is hoped that this strategy will spearhead activities that will support and build new initiatives and projects throughout the country. Ireland uses the ICD9 (9th Revision) for clinical coding and as yet the nursing profession does not operate at national level out of any nursing classification system. Some pilot projects are in progress to test out aspects of standardised language but this is in it's infancy. Meanwhile we lack a common approach to healthcare informatics making it difficult to develop national standards for areas such as a coding classification for nursing.

September 2002 sees the commencement of a four year degree programme as the basic entry level for nursing registration. This exciting programme gives us the opportunity to create innovative programmes and to incorporate nursing informatics into the education of all nurses.

Compiled by
Rita Collins email: rita.collins@ucd.ie
Rosaleen Murnane email: rmurnane@mater.ie

EFMI Working Group 5 (Nursing)

Country Report 2002

United Kingdom

Since the emergence of devolution across the UK, it is now impossible for one individual to give a report for the whole of the UK, thus this report is for England.

The National Health Service has in the past year undergone significant organisational changes and developments. The major change is the removal of the regional level of management and the insertion of smaller more local Strategic Health Authorities. The change over happened in April this year and there remains much settling into new roles, and indeed, much re-definition of roles. This upheaval has affected the informatics development but it anticipated that it should help informatics development as and when the dust settles.

There has also been the completion of the change towards Primary Care Trusts who now carry the balance of power within the NHS through new funding arrangements.

Under the auspices of the Treasury, a report was produced which has had significant impact upon the development of informatics in healthcare. The report, known as the Wanless Report (Chaired by Derek Wanless, 2002) made suggestions of the NHS's look in the year 2020 and highlighted many areas in need of dramatic attention and improvement.

The Information for Health (1998) strategy continues to be the one followed, this outlines work for the NHS until 2005. An interim report Building the IT Core (2000) extended some of the deadlines for completion of activities. Since the productionj of the Wanless Report there are moves afoot now to appoint an NHS informatics tzar who will report to the Cabinet Office, with Directors of Information installed in each Strategic Health Authority. The Department of Health Chief Nursing Officer is getting further involved with the nursing agenda linked to the above changes and she is hosting an invitation only meeting later in the year to discuss a way forward.

Interest in procurement (selection and purchase) of systems has also been given a higher order of importance, probably through the development of a Government Office called e-envoy which has been set up to determine national standards. A recent document appeared to be suggesting that there would be a list of suppliers to whom trusts could go in order to purchase new hospital/community systems especially to implement the Electronic Health/Patient Record. There was some concern that this might lead to a reduction in choice and disenfranchise some of the smaller local companies, however, recent publicity and developments at Strategic Health Authortity level appear to dissolve such arguments.

Nursing continues to be represented nationally through groups such as the British Computer Society Nursing Specialist Group, Nursing Professions Information Group and the Royal College. A new group has been set up by the NHS Information Authority/Dept of Health to look at the role and record keeping needs of nurses as we move further down the technical path. This is in particular relation to the Electronic Patient Record.

There has been significant progress in the area of knowledge management, not only from an access perspective, all trusts returned by the end of March 2002 that all employees had the facilities (email accounts) to access the internet whilst at work; but also from developments within the National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH). These developments will be helpful to individuals as well as healthcare practitioners.

There is development of a career path for informatitians in healthcare, this is aupported by the Ways of Working with Information which is all about Lifelong Learning and building an infrastructure to support such an initiative. The long awaited NHS University has been announced and key appointments have been made. Although the NHS University is seen as a corporate university, it does hope to apply for full University status before the end of the decade. In support of this, there is a nursing post registration (graduate) proposal undergoing consideration with the Higher Education eUniversity which will then be part of a packaged exchanged between the eUniversity and the NHS University.

The NHS has selected SNOMED CT as the coding classification system of choice and this is gradually gaining acceptance with users. Implementation has commenced.

With so much going on, I believe that nursing has managed to remain at the forefront of people's thinking and coordination, however, we must stay there if we are not to swept aside in a sea of change. If you would like to know more about the developments within the NHS, please see:

http://www.nhsia.nhs.uk/

Paula M Procter
11th July 2002

Country Report Germany
Nursing Informatics Activities
2002

The GMDS working group "Information Processing in Nursing" continues successfully to act as a catalyser between German nursing informatics interest groups and to teach and spread knowledge about nursing informatics. The website of the group (www.health-informatics.de/ gmds_ni) has been relaunched successfully in March 2002. It is invoked more than 250 times per months. This year the working group, together with the GMDS working group "clinical workstations", organised a half day workshop "efficient documentation in hospital supported by IT - chances and limitations" during the 7th German congress " "Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung in Krankenhaus und Versorgungsnetzen" in Heidelberg. The workshop, dated April 11th 2002, found considerable attendance and led to lively discussions. Besides, co-operation with the journal PR-Internet has been improved and the working group now runs an own column in this journal. This co-operation is intensified during the co-organisation of the European Nursing Informatics ENI 2002 congress. ENI 2002 is an international scientific congress for nursing informatics in Zürich / Switzerland 27th - 28th September 2002. Congress organisers are the University Hospital Zürich (USZ), the GMDS working group "Information Processing in Nursing", the working group "nursing informatics" SBK of the swiss nursing association and the journal PR-Internet. The two day program (3 parallel tracks) is centered around nursing language, nursing documentation, coding of nursing activities, nursing statistics and nursing oeconomics. The congress has a novel structure which permits remote live participation and e-learning via internet with special software. Besides there have been regular meetings of the working group itself. The last meeting in September 2001 (Cologne) appointed Mrs. Elske Ammenwerth (UMIT Innsbruck) as the new co-chair of the group. For next year a revival of the German nursing informatics summer school is planned.

Upcoming events:
European Nursing Informatics ENI , Zurich 27.-28.9.02 http://www.pr-internet.com/lernwelten2002/informatik2002/default.asp
Münchner Pflegekongreß 2002, Munich,21.-23.10.02 http://www.pflegekongress-muenchen.de/
13. Internationales Symposium für Intensivmedizin und Intensivpflege Bremen 19.- 21.2.03 http://www.intensivmed.de/contents/home.html
3. Fachtagung Multimedia in der Pflege, Düsseldorf, 14.3.03 www.nursing.de

Dr. Thomas Bürkle
GMDS representative for
EFMI WG5 and IMIA SIG Nursing Informatics
Institute of Medical Informatics and Biomathematics
University of Münster
Domagkstr. 9
48129 Münster
Germany

Annual report from Swiss Nursing Informatics Group
Patrick Weber Swiss representative at IMIA SIG_NI and EFMI NursIE

Swiss Nursing Informatics Group is very active. The present summary concerns 2001 and 2002. President or secretary if needed could give more information. The website is accessible at www.swissnurse.ch.

In 2001 members of our group participated actively to the national annual congress of Swiss Society for Medical Informatics, in Sion

Since the beginning of 2002 our group is very active in organizing the 1st European Nursing Informatics congress in Zürich in September 2002 ENI2002. Full information are available at www.pr-internet.com/eni2002

We have three Internet groups active these are: network for nursing informatics, network for nursing data, and network for ICNP users group. Development of international classification is followed (ICF, ICNP, NIC, NOC,…). A Swiss classification called LEP (Leistung Erfassung der Pflege) is now used all over Switzerland. The purpose of this classification is to collect daily nursing activity and measure the nursing time allowing workload management in nursing. http://www.lep.ch/Language/Englishframe.htm

NURSING data project is continuing with a budget for future development. Follow the progress at http://www.hospvd.ch/public/ise/nursingdata/index.htm.

Annual report from the NI- group of the Norwegian
Society for Medical Informatics (FDH) 2001/2002 Meetings:

Regional Health Networks- future use of IKT in healthcare Electronic Patient Record- status 2001

Karl Øyri
NURSIE representative, FDH Vice President www.fdh.no

Patrick Weber 16.08.2002