Report of activities to EFMI Council
For the period May 2003 to June 2004
Presented on June 12th 2004, EFMI Council meeting, Munich
by Patrick Weber, Chairman of the working group
Email: patrick.weber@nicecomputing.ch

Selection of members

We still have 13 country members and 7 associate members in our group. No recruitment was done last year but we have interested persons that are asking to join the group.

Vice president and secretary

Our vice president Paula Procter is resigning for the next meeting at MedInfo 2004. She is proposing Peter Murray to represent UK. Then new election for vice chair has to be done.

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.
  
• To publish in 2005 a book in collaboration with nurses from USA, New Zealand about today nursing informatics situation.
  

Recent activities

• May 2003 St-Malo MIE: Workshop with good participation and Working group meeting
• June 2003 Rio-Janeiro NI: Active participation of many members from our group as well as for Tutorial, Workshops, and Scientific presentation. Also for the post congress Workshop we had a good participation the results are edited in a proceeding entitled: Marin H.F, Mendoca E., Pedreira M. Pereira Marquez E,. Improving Patient Safety with Technology. E-papers editor. 2003.
• August 2003 the Summer School of nursing informatics was canceled due to a lack of participants.
• Active participation of 2nd European Nursing Informatics congress In September 2003, in Frankfurt Germany.
• November 2003 Bled Slovenia together with our Slovenian representative active participation in their annual conference where I gave a keynote speech.
• March 2004 Sarajevo active participation at the conference organized by the EFMI Bosnians representative
• Finland and Switzerland are preparing a competition for the organization of NI 2009
• Several of our members are very active and participate to many congress and Workshop on Open source. Karl Oyri or Peter Murray could be contacted.
• Together with editors from US, New Zealand and myself for Europe we started to collect documents from experts from all over the world in order to publish a book in 2005.
• 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
  

Annual report from Swiss Nursing Informatics Group
Patrick Weber Swiss representative at IMIA/NI-SIG and EFMI NursIE

Swiss Nursing Informatics Group is very active. The present summary concerns 2003. President or secretary if needed could give more information. The website is accessible at www.swissnurse.ch. As president of the Working Group 5 Nursing Informatics Europe of EFMI (European Federation for Medical Informatics) you may find also information about Nursing Informatics of EFMI at http://www.nicecomputing.ch/nieurope.

In 2003 members of our group co-organizes and participates at the 2nd European Nursing Informatics congress in Frankfurt in September ENI2003.

Unfortunately the European Summer School of Nursing Informatics in Geneva had to be cancelled due to a lack of participants.

The 3nd European Nursing Informatics congress will be in Innsbruck Austria in 30.9 and 1.10 2004, see http://bisg.umit.at/eni2004/ where our German speaking colleagues will be very active. Our Swiss Society For Medical Informatics will also have its congress at the same place together with the German and the Austrian society 26 to 30 sept. 2004. For information see http://www.gmds2004.at/

We where busy to candidate for NI2009 organization in Geneva, we have prepared a very good proposal. If we are winning participants of the NI2009 in Geneva will be welcome like our best guests in Geneva.

We still have three Internet groups active: network for nursing informatics, network for nursing data, and network for ICNP users group. Development of international classification is followed (ICF, ICNP, NIC, NOC, NANDA). 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, the fist data collection was made in 2003 and gives interesting results. Follow the progress at http://www.isesuisse.ch/nursingdata/en/index.htm.

Generally in Switzerland the collection of data is becoming very important, quality - and cost- management of the state and the insurances become more and more effective. Therefore the role of the informatics increased but also the costs for informatics.

Patrick Weber August 2004
EFMI Working Group 5 (Nursing)

Country Report 2004 England

The past year has been quite a roller coaster in terms of informatics infrastructure development across the National Health Service (NHS). The National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) has dominated discussion and practical work across all areas of health care.
The National Programme has been funded by the Government to around £5 billion to ensure effective implementation of the information infrastructure to allow use of individual electronic health records supported by a centralised 'spine' containing limited general information on individuals. For more information, please see http://www.npfit.nhs.uk/
There have been further changes to support organisations, the NHS Information Policy Unit has gone and the NHS Information Authority has been significantly streamlined. This upheaval has resulted in both positive and negative issues for nursing. On the positive side, there is some movement and interest now being taken by the nursing governing bodies which has resulted in a higher profile for the British Computer Society Nursing Specialist Group which has been re-named the British Computer Society Health Informatics (Nursing) Specialist Group. The BCS HI(Nursing) has held a number of meetings and seminars over the year, either on its own or in collaboration with other groups. One such meeting was with the Chief Nurse and the head of the National Programme in an effort to raise the profile of nursing across the new venture. Although in part successful, there remains significant medical dominance in the approaches taken. We are pleased to see the emergence of a Care Records Board upon which patients are being invited to take part. The Nursing Professions Information Group (NPIG) continues to be significantly involved with the centre and new developments. NPIG has commented upon a number of reports and specifications and for a short period set up a nursing expert group to the Design Authority before both were disbanded.
The education sector, now housed in Universities, has had little input to the developments and although involved in research in the area, there remains little or no direct courses aligned to health informatics in programmes at all levels. There is a growing divide between education and practice demonstrated by the lack of information being sent to Universities from within the NHS and the continued lack of access by Universities to the ever-growing NHS network.
The NHS University (http://www.nhsu.nhs.uk/webportal/) has been launched, although originally identified as a 'corporate' university, it would appear to moving quickly into a more significant position offering degrees etc.
In conclusion, the new National Programme is leading everything at this time, its implementation appears to be medically orientated and as with previous years, there is much change and confusion amongst the NHS workforce and those academically supporting the professions.

Paula M Procter
August 2004

Country Report Germany
Nursing Informatics Activities 2004

The European Nursing Informatics conference ENI has become an established conference and builds an important milestone for nursing informatics in Europe and Germany meanwhile. The 2nd ENI took place September 4th and 5th 2003 in Frankfurt/Main (Germany) and the 3rd ENI will be in Innsbruck from Sept 30th to October 1st immediately following the German Medical Informatics Association Annual meeting which in 2004 is held together with the Swiss and Austrian Medical Informatics Association in Innsbruck, Austria as well. The two day event will comprise parallel tracks and workshops, see http://bisg.umit.at/eni2004/Flyer_ENI-v1.pdf.

The GMDS working group "Information Processing in Nursing" (http://www.health-informatics.de/gmds_ni/) which is chaired by Prof. U. Schrader together with Prof. E. Ammenwerth as co-chair was not only active in preparation of ENI 2003 and ENI 2004 (both chairs are member of the ENI program committee 2004), but in addition offered a one day workshop at the KIS Tagung (Tagung on hospital information systems) in Mannheim March 24th-26th which attracted some 30 participants. See also http://www.health-informatics.de/gmds_ni/kis-tagung%202004.pdf.

Reestablishment of a German Nursing Informatics Summer School has seen some problems. While the 3rd German summerschool for nursing informatics was held successfully in Ockenheim near Mainz from 14th - 18th July 2003, the 4th event, scheduled for July 19th-23rd 2004 had to be cancelled due to low application numbers (http://www.desspi.de/) Nevertheless a new summer school will be scheduled in 2005.

PD. Dr. Thomas Bürkle
EFMI WG5 secretary and IMIA SIG Nursing Informatics representative
Institute of Medical Informatics
University of Erlangen
Krankenhausstraße 12
91054 Erlangen
Germany

Nursing Informatics in Finland in 2003 - 2004, since Rio 2003

Development activities

At national level the project to unify information systems, national data archives and data security solutions by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health has proceeded. The consensus of the national data requirements for EHR has been achieved. The national EHR system will include the nursing minimum data set by the year 2007.

Some hospitals have already implemented our NMDS in their hospital information systems. The use of our NMDS is based on HHCC and the Finnish Classification of Nursing Interventions (FiCNI). The electronic nursing referrals and discharge summaries are in clinical use in some hospital districts. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health is funding 2004 a pilot project for nurses' electronic networking. The co-operation with HL7 Finland has increased and nursing care plan will be harmonized by HL7 CDA R2 standard by the year 2006.

The Nursing terminology for data and literature retrieval has now been attached to the Finnish MeSH-translation the FinMeSH and will be used for indexing Finnish nursing literature.

At local level several hospitals and health centres have networked for developing the structure of electronic care plan. The development work for the national EHR infrastructure is carried out multidisciplinary teams. Nurses' interest in the acquaintance in other terminologies i.e. NIC, NOC and ICNP has increased. Several hospitals have also improved nursing knowledge and skills in information technology use.

Research

The annual meeting of Social and Health Informatics Association took place in May 2004. Some 80 active researches had presentations and discussed about resent health informatics studies in Finland. In 2004 a doctoral dissertation about the electronic documentation of ICU patient care has been published in Oulu University.

In spring 2004 The Finnish Center for the Technology Development launched a development and research program FinnWell. With this funding it is possible to enhance the health informatics development and research. Some projects are already approved.

Education

From the first Social and Health Informatics Master's Degree Programme in Finland by the year 2004 20 students have got their Master's degree. The three years programme is based on the recommendations of IMIA WG 1 for informatics education. Kuopio University offers also multi-disciplinary continuing education modules of informatics for people working in social and health care. The introduction course of social- and health care informatics has been available as a web-based course for every university with nursing degree programme.

At the bachelors' level education several Nursing Polytechnics have also adopted informatics modules in their programs. The new multidiscipline programme (e-well) focusing on IT-use in health care has proved to be necessary and students have started their development assignments in public and private sector.

In March 2004 The Finnish Nurses Association organized the annual conference for nurses - The Nurses Days and the First international nursing informatics symposium. More than 600 nurses got together to listen the information technology presentations during the Nurses Days. About 100 colleges get together and networked for nursing terminology development at the international symposium guided by international experts. The Finnish Nurses Association has published in March 2004 a book 'Electronic Nursing Documentation' authored by Ensio & Saranto.

Traditionally in May the Finnish Federation of Municipalicies had two days Health care informatics seminar where nursing had an own session. Nurses had also presentations in other sessions of the seminar.

The Finnish Nurses Association has gathered an expert group for preparing the proposal to hold the 10th International Conference in Nursing Informatics - NI 2009 - in Helsinki Finland. The association welcomes the IMIA NI Conference to Finland and will take the full responsibility in case of financial loss.

Kaija Saranto
Finn representative at EFMI WG 5
kaija.saranto@uku.fi

Anneli Ensio
Finn representative at IMIA NI
anneli.ensio@uku.fi