Laboratory/Nursing Station Interface

Abstract

Placing any medical system within the operating confines of the nursing station is the ultimate challenge. In a busy nursing station environment employees are usually conservative and show a great reluctance to change anything. Only when a situation becomes a crisis will there come a cry for change. This philosophy is a direct result of the highly skilled and detailed schedule which exists in this environment, and the extreme expectations and demands of the physicians who manipulate and control the staff for their patients. The hospital is always pressed between the demands of the physicians and the requirements of reasonable administrative control. If a new system does not provide some concrete, useful material for the nursing station and its personnel, it will be promptly rejected by the users. The nursing personnel have a close allegiance to practicing physicians and can mobilize their strength and power to inhibit anything that impinges on their personal ideas of success. All it takes is one nurse saying that the system has compromised patient care: one such statement made to a single physician can jeopardize a whole project. For this reason the coordination of any system with the nursing station personnel and clerks is a very highly sensitive task that deserves the undivided attention of any group attempting to interface with them to create such a working relationship.