"Thanks for making the connection between nursing and engineering/design. I'm an industrial designer who also became an RN. I saw a lot of issues in nursing process that has design solutions. There are so many existing business tools that could help make nursing safer and better which would allow the nurse to spend more brain power focusing on critical analysis and decisions rather than tasks and scheduling. For example, if a patient has a procedure and needs to go off unit for it, the RN could see where conflicts exist with medication passes and receive alerts that they can set for themselves to ameliorate those issues. These can be automated so that the RN can then spend their energy looking at their patients and engaging with them. There's a way to create a communication plan between providers based on each patient, and allow the care team to speak to each other and that also manages to stay within HIPPA guidelines. There is a design solution to help prevent RN burnout." -Ki Charm John Kim RN and Industrial Designer
Sharing some reads that had serious impact on my view of the nurse engineer in 2024. Would love to hear about yours and any thoughts on you have on these.
Kondepudi, D. K., De Bari, B., & Dixon, J. A. (2020). Dissipative Structures, Organisms and Evolution. Entropy, 22(11), 1305. https://doi.org/10.3390/e22111305
“These and many other distinctions between organisms and machines point to thermodynamics as the foundational science for both dissipative structures and organisms. It must be noted that, while machines and organisms are fundamentally different classes of systems, machines are richly integrated into human life. Machines may be understood as parts of a broader non-equilibrium self-organizing system, but absent that embedding they are fundamentally different.”
“Nurses noted the increased work needed to not only maintain adequate machine/patient connections but also to provide psychological support for patients and families fearful of these machines. Automation had not only created a new kind of work for the nurse; it has also increased the need for what had always been core work of nursing: to provide physical and psychological comfort. The new machinery engendered not only greater need for emotional support of the patient, but its physical design mandated more physical care.” (p.129)
“Many safety engineering (and system engineering, for that matter) efforts focus on the technical system details. Little effort is made to consider the social, organizational, and human components of the system in the design process. Assumptions are made that operators will be trained to do the right things and that they will adapt to whatever design they are given. Sophisticated human factors and system analysis input is lacking, and when accidents inevitably result, they are blamed on the operators for not behaving the way designers thought they would.”(p. 174)
Donella Meadows Project – The Academy for Systems Change
“Systems thinking leads to another conclusion–however, waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”
-Donella Meadows
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