Research project: Direct access to nursing knowledge at the point of care with LEP

Nursing care is becoming increasingly complex, and research in nursing science is continuously producing new findings. New employees, employees who received some of their training in other countries, and float staff must quickly familiarise themselves with each ward’s guidelines and ways of working. At the same time, workloads for point-of-care nursing staff are increasing, and there is often little time available for obtaining information.

To support high-quality nursing and safe treatment, it is therefore necessary to provide up-to-date, evidence-based nursing knowledge that is integrated into nursing staff’s work flows. For several years now, LEP has been pursuing the idea of enabling direct access to nursing knowledge from electronic patient documentation. Forming the basis for this are links from LEP interventions to knowledge sources. For example, a mapping from LEP interventions to VAR Healthcare operating procedures has existed since 2019, and a mapping to research article summaries at FIT Nursing Care has been in place since 2022.

In July of last year, the Swiss business development organisation Innosuisse issued an innovation cheque to LEP AG. This allowed for a preliminary study in collaboration with a team from the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST) to identify the requirements for an integrated knowledge management system at the point of care. Surveys of employees in various nursing positions in a Swiss hospital yielded the following core points: Time and simplicity of the knowledge access process, and the certainty of accessing information that reflects the current state of knowledge.

As our next step, we hope to develop an initial version of an integrated knowledge management system as part of an innovation project. We are currently looking for other interested hospitals for the practical implementation and evaluation stages. If interested, please contact Glorianna Jagfeld.

Further information:

Open-access research article on mapping LEP interventions to FIT Nursing Care: Ranegger, Renate; Haug, Simon; Vetsch, Janine; Baumberger, Dieter; Bürgin, Reto (2022): Providing evidence-based knowledge on nursing interventions at the point of care: findings from a mapping project. In: BMC medical informatics and decision making 22 (1), S. 308. DOI: 10.1186/s12911-022-02053-8.