Labour-saving technological innovations for nurses
Enhancing job satisfaction for nurses in an academic hospital
The nursing profession is facing a critical shortage, a challenge projected to intensify in the coming years. Nurses dedicate themselves to complex, demanding work, often sacrificing valuable patient interaction due to overwhelming tasks. This Sustainable Health Program aims to support nurses and improve their experiences by co-creating and implementing practical technological innovations. We’re tackling issues like, for example, time-consuming material searches, repetitive routines, and physically strenuous tasks such as patient repositioning.
We believe the key to success lies in a truly collaborative approach. By bringing together scientists from diverse fields, alongside the invaluable expertise and experiences of nurses, we ensure that our innovations are not only promising but also practical and readily adopted.
Facing the nursing shortage: innovating for a better future
Our ultimate goal is to co-create impactful innovations with and for nurses, rigorously test them in real-world hospital settings, and measure their effects on job satisfaction and nurse retention. Ultimately, we’ll delve into the crucial aspects of implementation, identifying and overcoming barriers to ensure these solutions make a lasting difference.
Ambition
Our ambition is to understand and shape current and future technology-mediated nursing work processes – towards a meaningful and viable future of work for nurses, and thereby contribute to sustainable health. Our transdisciplinary research embraces the real-world complex interplay between nurses, robotic capabilities, technology adaptation and organizational practices at Erasmus MC.
Our aim
We aim to co-create innovations that nurses will experience as truly supportive when carrying out essential care work, integrated in daily practices in ways that fit them, and viable and sustainable from an organizational perspective, to safeguard quality of care.
I don't think that in the practical, holistic profession that we have, you can just think of a robot that takes over everything from me, because it is still people work.
Laura, ICU Nurse
Research focus
Consortium expertise
Our consortium consists of professionals from the Erasmus MC, TU Delft, and Erasmus University, all with their own distinct expertise. Our interdisciplinary team will simultaneously develop and assess interventions: our engineers and designers will enable nurses to explore and experience cutting-edge robotic capabilities to co-create new work processes, as our social scientists monitor worker wellbeing and organizational processes. Our innovation and implementation experts have ample experience in co-creating innovations between nurses and technicians, and empowering nurses to become innovation ambassadors. This transdisciplinary academic team works with innovators in a transdisciplinary approach to research and innovation with and for nurses.
Who will benefit?
Staff shortages have a negative impact on the workload and job satisfaction of nurses, their ability to deliver adequate care, and ultimately affect retention and recruitment efforts. We thereby acknowledge the nursing workforce shortage as a complex problem or grand challenge relating to the many different stakeholders in healthcare, and the inherent complexity of the nurses’ work. Addressing this challenge is imperative for the sustainability of the healthcare system. Technological innovations, including robotics, could contribute to address this challenge. These innovations can range from low-tech ‘quick wins’ to high-tech ‘future prospects’, and may encompass the digital (software, data), the physical (tools and machines) as well as AI-powered robots.
Searching for material, or leaving the patient for a while to grab the material or thing you need, I think robots would actually be suitable for that.
Our project is expected to provide a blueprint of how robotics and technological innovations should be co-designed, co-developed and implemented into nursing care. We will empower nurses to co-design, pilot-test, and then implement robotic assistance into their work practices, assessing their impact on job satisfaction, cost effectiveness and nurses’ and patient experience of the innovations and their embedding in daily care practises. Simultaneously, we will assess the level of compliance with the innovations.
At the end of the project, we will disseminate the results within the organisation and on (inter)national conferences and publications.
It could help to look at what the biggest time-wasting tasks are... and those may not even be nursing-related.
Researchers from TU Delft, Erasmus MC and Erasmus University Rotterdam are teaming up to work on sustainable healthcare. Within three research programmes, they are committed to sustainable operating rooms, endoscopy and innovation for nurses.
