Area of Focus: Education/Eldercare
Partnership agency: Ngee Ann Polytechnic, PulseSync Pte Ltd
Conceptualised & Initiated by Lien Foundation
The Lien Foundation has fired its second salvo to overturn the nursing profession’s poor image - a problem endemic in Singapore where the job of nurses is often shunned and avoided.
Today, nursing students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of Health Sciences wield sleek PDAs (personal digital assistant) on campus and their clinical attachment. They are part of the NPalm (Ngee Ann Polytechnic Augmented Learning Media) project which the Lien Foundation has conceived and successfully rolled out for entire final year cohort of students pursuing the Diploma in Health Sciences (Nursing) and all the school staff. NPalm will eventually be extended to the entire School of Health Sciences.
NPalm is Asia’s first e-mobile learning media for nursing students’ entire curriculum content. Equipped with a PDA each, the students are able to view their entire curriculum wherever they are. They can also access drug and disease databases and even tap upon the PDA to translate commonly used Chinese dialects and Malay phrases. In addition the PDA also acts as a digital learning journal that enhances self-directed learning by the students. More importantly, it has become an indispensable learning tool for the students who spend a third of their entire length of study on clinical attachments at hospitals. NPalm has also digitized the traditional paper based nursing logbook that records students’ learnt skills, allowing them to graduate and become nurses.
The PDAs are rich in visuals and diagrams, allowing students on attachment to easily follow the healthcare assessment procedures for patients step-by-step. In addition, lecturers can pre-load tests intended for the students before they begin their practicum, ensuring a certain level of competency. They also can better identify the learning needs of students and track their progress through NPalm, thus ensuring that help is at hand. They can also look forward to new features in the pipeline - a database of commonly used medication in Singapore and the ability to discuss cases interactively via the PDAs on campus.
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NPalm follows from an earlier successful PDA project conceptualized by the Lien Foundation that gave home care nurses a boost with its easy and light mobile medical information solution. Armed with PDAs that held patients’ medical records as well as key drug databases and important information, home care nurses from HCA Hospice Care and Home Nursing Foundation said a happy good bye to heavy physical files and laborious paperwork. This successful IT deployment has boosted the morale and image of these home care nurses who have tasted the sweet fruits of technology and are ready to embrace the next innovation.
Likewise, the NPalm initiative is recreating the future of nursing by uplifting the nursing profession in a guerilla manner. A new generation of tech-savvy nurses is being fostered today. The young student nurses who will eventually join the healthcare workforce, are now IT savvy and active users of technology through this experience. With this mindset, they will seek and embrace technology in their work environment. As nurses form the bedrock in health service, they have the potential to change and spur IT adoption in the healthcare sector.
This is key to the healthcare sector as it faces a shortage of nurses coupled with the increasing healthcare demands of an aging population. Healthcare practitioners and nursing educators need to better harness IT to face these challenges.
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