A Study of Nureses' Adapting Behavior to the Information System in General Hospitals

This study attempts to explore the adapting behaviors of medical professions in information society, focusing on nurses' responses to the changes driven by the implementation of information system in four general hospitals. In addition to the general status of the information in the hospitals, we analyze four dimensions of the adapting behaviors of nursed in the implementation process of the hospital work. These are 1) changes in the jobs and functions of the nurses ; 2) changes in their autonomy and status; 3)changes in human relations ; and 4) the quality of medical services.

Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from two university-affiliated hospitals and two private general hospitals in Seoul. The quantitative data contain the responses of 92 nurses from four hospitals and we performed an in-depth-interview with 12 nurse to complement the quantitative data.

1) The implementation of information system in the sample hospitals are limited to the computerization of the administrative part of the medical care.

2) This limited computerization of the hospital works does not seem to increase the efficiency of nursing itself, but rather put mote burden on nurses doing double jobs of handwriting and computerization.

3) The autonomy of nurses and their relate status has not been noticeably changed in the process. Nurses, however, reported to have conflicts with other professions over the job distributions.

4) The computerization of the hospital works tend to reduce an unnecessary face-to-face interaction, which is expected to facilitate communications in the hospital. But there are still conflicts among medical professions over the boundary of their duties and responsibilities.

5) Nurse pointed out that the positive effects of the computerization on the quality of service are limited to shorten the time of care.

The results of this study confirms our hypothesis that the information system would change jobs and functions, autonomy and status, human relations, and quality of sevices in nursing. Some of the changes are positive although the implementation of information system is expected to put more burden on nursing for a while. Most nurses, however, expected the computerization will provide better services to the patients in the long run.