Designing Dips nursing plans

The ageing of the population and the increase in chronic, long-standing illnesses, as well as peoples rising expectations, put increased pressure on health care provision. Accordingly, there are reiterating ambitions of streamlining health care through notions such as shared care, integrated care, and continuity of care for patients that require complex, and often long-term care.

Background

Standardization of care through nursing plans (with the classification system NIC and NANDA) is a materialization of these ambitions. The use of such plans is closely aligned with the health authorities’ ambition of quality assurance and cost control. Standardized care plans serve as a complex workflow system across departmental, institutional, and professional boundaries. Common nursing plans may ensure that information about chronic patients’ conditions may be easily shared between homecare services, nursing homes, and hospitals.

Goals

Dips ASA is on the threshold of redesigning its nursing module. The goal is to develop a completely new Dips nursing module based on a new architecture. The new module will serve as the stepping-stone for Dips ASA’s effort to internationalize its portfolio of clinical information systems. For Dips ASA it is therefore important to improve the understanding of which role these plans play in daily practice and how they can be integrated with other information sources.

As these plans are used for managing chronically illnesses, findings in this area will also contribute to TTL as the scope of these plans may be extended to people’s homes and home care services. Knowledge about how nursing plans may support old and chronic patients will also provide insight into how other TLL-generated technologies (such as medical sensors and decision support systems) should be implemented and exploited in a complex clinical practice.

Research

As research questions, we ask how the new Dips nursing plan should be designed in order to:
• Improve workflow between the care staff (nurses, assistant nurses, etc)
• Improve workflow across professional boundaries (nurses, physicians, etc.)
• Improve workflow between different institutions?
• Improve predictability and standardized planning of care?
• Be a foundation for resource management and research?
• Improve the performance of nurses’ work?
• Incorporate information from external sources (such as sensor data and other systems)

Method

The research method will be founded on an interpretive approach, basically including interviews and participant observation of the implementation and use of the Dips nursing plan. Three different psychiatric hospitals wards will serve as research cites: Åsgård hospital in Tromsø, one other Norwegian hospital and one hospital in United Kingdom. The candidates will be part of the Dips development team, thus enabling design guidelines to the system developers.

Project manager

Gunnar Ellingsen, UiT

Project members from the partners

• PhD Torbjørg Meum (funded from UiT) – supervisor: Gunnar Ellingsen
• PhD Rune Pedersen (funded by Dips ASA) – supervisor: Gunnar Ellingsen

Researchers

Gunnar Ellingsen, UiT

International collaborators

Signe Vikkelsø - Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Jesper Simonsen - Roskilde University, Denmark
Brit Ross Winthereik – Technical University of Denmark

Project start/ stop

June 2007 – June 2011

Contribution to health care

As these plans are used for managing chronically illnesses, findings in this area will also contribute to TTL as the scope of these plans may be extended to people’s homes and home care services. Knowledge about how nursing plans may support old and chronic patients will also provide insight into how other TTL-generated technologies (such as medical sensors and decision support systems) should be implemented and exploited in a complex clinical practice.

Contribution to new industry

The project will contribute to sustainability and scalability of nursing care plans.

Contact info

e-mail: Gunnar Ellingsen, mobile phone: +47 911 65 215

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