Embedding nursing informatics education into an Australian undergraduate nursing degree

Alongside the rapid rise in the adoption of electronic health records and the use of technology to support nursing processes, there is a requirement for nursing students, new graduate nurses, and nursing educators to embrace nursing informatics. Whilst nursing informatics has been taught at post graduate levels for many years, the integration of it into undergraduate studies for entry level nurses has been slow. This is made more complex by the lack of explicit nursing informatics competencies in many countries. Australia has now mandated the inclusion of nursing informatics into all undergraduate nursing curricula but there continues to be an absence of a relevant set of agreed nursing competencies. There is a resulting lack of consistency in nursing curricula content nationally. This paper describes the process used by one Australian university to integrate nursing informatics throughout the undergraduate nursing degree curriculum to ensure entry level nurses have a basic level of skills in the use of informatics.