University Nursing: Professional Practice Reflective Essay on E-Health

This reflective essay examines the use of e-health in professional nursing practice. The author, a registered nurse, shares personal experiences with e-health technologies, including their impact on patient communication, service delivery, and team management. The essay reflects on the benefits such as improved communication and efficiency, while also addressing challenges related to security, ethics, and data privacy. The author supports their experiences with a review of relevant literature, comparing personal insights with established research on e-health. The essay concludes with strategies for improving e-health practices, focusing on enhancing security, addressing ethical concerns, and ensuring the technology's effective use in patient care. The paper emphasizes the importance of continuous updates, staff training, and advanced data encryption to maintain patient trust and ensure the responsible application of technology in healthcare.

Running head: PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE REFFLECTIVE ESSAY
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE REFFLECTIVE ESSAY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE REFFLECTIVE ESSAY
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................1
Personal Self-Reflection..................................................................................................................1
Evaluation of Reflection..................................................................................................................3
Strategies for Practice......................................................................................................................5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................8

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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE REFFLECTIVE ESSAY
Introduction
Technology has the potential to solve various issues faced by the nations whether
developed or developing countries. Technology has been an integral part in all kinds of industry
recently including health industry. This is done to reduce the complexities in offering health care
services to the patients. Technology has been one of the crucial part for registered nurse with the
increase in burden from patients. Technology has helped the healthcare industry from delivery of
services to offering long distance help. One such technology has formed an important part of
healthcare sector is e-health facility that allows the nurses and healthcare workers to offer quality
healthcare treatment on a priority basis to the patients (Vayena et al., 2018). However, this type
of healthcare facility also creates various challenges for the nurse as well as for the patients.
The essay discusses about the experience in working in healthcare and the facility offered by e-
health initiatives. Further, the experience is compared with past literature on e-health and its role
in helping registered nurse. Lastly, various ways has been investigated through which e-health
helps in improving the practice of the nurse in improving the patients care in healthcare.
Personal Self-Reflection
Description
As a registered nurse of the organization I have considered e-health usage that helped me
throughout my processes and the responsibility I hold towards the nurse. I used e-health in
connecting with the patients, offered them timely health service even when they are unable to
reach out to me physically. Further, I also used e-health to consult with the doctors and gain
information on crucial matter before suggesting and helping the patients. E-health has also
helped me in communicating with my peers and other non-registered nurses about dealing with

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certain health issues. Moreover, I aimed at using this technology in offering nursing help to the
patients by avoiding unnecessary therapeutic interventions. While using e-health I developed a
website and kept a close contact with the patients as well as the doctors and other registered
nurses. The organization develop e-health web-site to reduce the gap with the patients and
doctors as well as between doctors and nurses. I used that website to conduct e-health
information and care to the patients. Other nurses and my sub-ordinates also used this services
and through e-health I was able to connect and handle my team effectively and guide them
correctly towards various care services. The result of this usage was that I was able to reduce my
care time per patients along with gaining better knowledge. However, I also faced challenges
while using e-health such as security issues, ethical issues, and strategy formation. Confusions
and regulation issues.
Feelings
After using the e-health technology in conducting my responsibility of registered nurse I
felt that this technology offers various advantages to the healthcare providers such as better
communication facility, effectively meeting the goals in health, improving the efficiency in
healthcare, improving the quality of service offered and empowering the patients so that they can
make a satisfactory choice. Moreover, being a registered nurse I had the responsibility to handle
a team and I felt through e-health I was able to gain new information on health issues and helped
my team effectively with those information. Thus, e-health has helped me in many ways by
opening new avenues for gaining knowledge about medicines. Further, I feel e-health also
reduces the time I used to take to offer service to the patients such as suggesting medicines,
guiding them through timely checkup and others because it helped me to record information of

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the patients. However, my experiences made me felt that there are various challenges of using e-
health that needs to be reduced such as ethics, security and others.
Evaluation
The positive thing about e-health technology is that it helped me connect with the patients
as well as with the co-doctor and nurses. Further, positive impact of e-health is that it has helped
me in widening the scope of service provision across geographical boundaries. However, there
has been negative impact such as ethical issues, breach of patient’s information and other threat
faced due to e-health.
Conclusion
Technology usage such as e-health had positive experience for me as well as for other
nurses and doctor. E-health can be used in future as well if the security and ethical issues are
eliminated.
Action
I would contact with the information technology department of our organization and
improve the security level of the website and also secure patient and doctor ethical relation.
Evaluation of Reflection
The experienced that has been stated above about the use of e-health and technology
development in healthcare can be supported with literature. Brennan, McElligott & Power (2015)
has stated that e-health is a broad term that encompasses various things that is related to internet
for facilitating the healthcare practices. Health professionals are increasingly attracted in
evaluating the internet to use it as a common medium for information about health and medicine.

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In addition to this, it has been stated that e-health has increased the chances of the healthcare
providers such as nurses with the capability to interact with consumers on online platform and
getting rid of all kinds of geographical barriers. This part of literature is similar with the
experience that I had as a nurse while using e-health. I was also able to interact with my patients
effectively even if they were not physically present. In addition to this, Wickramasinghe &
Schaffer (2010) has defined that e-health is a medical informatics that allows for free flow of
medical information through the internet as and when needed. Thus, this fact also aligns with my
experience with e-health, as I use the website to connect with the doctors about sharing
information about the patients and other diagnostic reports. According to Alpay et al., (2010)
there has key challenges in the implementation development of e-health. This is because there
are trust issues faced with patients’ security related to bug data in such digital technologies.
Privacy with customers’ data has been the biggest challenge offered by e-health and the
difficulty in dealing with such issue. This aligns with the challenges I faced in managing the
privacy of patient’s data in e-health technology. It has been clearly stated in the literature that
trust and privacy are greatly linked in the healthcare sector and thus it becomes important for the
healthcare professional to manage legal guidelines to protect the data of the patients. This is the
only way by which they can gain the trust of the patients in the healthcare unit. This is because
lack in privacy issue also raises ethical challenge because the healthcare system needs to comply
by ethical regulations. Yusif, Hafeez-Baig & Soar (2017) stated that e-health helps in
empowering the patients by offering them great information about various medical issues and
making them ready for future treatments. They are able to learn about medical symptoms,
nutrition, physical activities and others from the e-health website easily. Further, they are also
able to keep personal health records in the website that they can view whenever they want.

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However, this information from the literature refuted from my learning because I have not
experienced such usefulness that e-health offers to the patients.
Uluc & Ferman (2016) in the paper has stated that e-health has contributed successfully
to the quality of care offered that involves not only reducing the costs of medical health, it also
helped in offering quality service. Further, the usage of e-health should be evidence based that
means that the efficiency of such technology should not be assumed, it should be proven with
scientific evaluation. This statement in literature about e-health and its effectiveness does not
align with my experience because my organization adopted the use of e-health technology by just
studying about it and without any proper testing process (Lau & Loiselle, 2018). Thus, my
experiences has been supported by literature to some extent such as the benefits and challenges
of e-health on patients and nurses.
Strategies for Practice
There are needs for positive strategies to solve the issue faced from e-health such as
security issues and ethical issues. It is important to reduce the challenges so that we are able to
gain the trust of the patients. Vayena et al., (2018) has stated that generic infrastructure needs to
be developed for e-health initiatives. To improve the security it is important to give special
attention to the ICT infrastructure. This is because a sound infrastructure is one of the most
important ingredient to be taken for e-health initiatives. Such infrastructure include
telecommunications, electricity, security codes and others. Thus, or organization should also
think to develop their infrastructure of their e-heath website so that the security of the website is
improved and there is no chance of information breach. This will also help to reduce the ethical
issues that my patients has been facing in the organization.

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In addition to this, there are other ways in which the security risk of e-health can be
improved and allow me to offer better health service through this new technology.
 Continual updates such as conducting audits and training of new nurses helps in
complying with the regulations of using e-health.
 There should be permission setting to control the access of people to the e-health website
and protect it with password so that there is no breach of patient information.
 Advanced data encryption is yet another way to improve security and ethics in healthcare
service. this means that all data of patients collected through online channel should be
protected with the help of encrypted technology to comply with the Clinical Health Act
 A testing of security should be conducted from time to time to ensure that the staffs are
able to recognize and protect the scams and data breaches going on in the website
(Wickramasinghe & Schaffer, 2010).
These are some of the steps that needs to be followed by the healthcare organization in which
I work so that I can lead my duties of registered nurse effectively. Such changes will me connect
to more patients online and to gain more information about them without putting their life at risk.
These steps are important because security is the only issue that I have faced while using e-health
system in conducting my nursing service. Technology is effective, however, needs to be
managed in order to reduce the risk
Conclusion
In conclusion, it can be said that e-health has helped me in offering my service effectively
by communicating with both the patients and the doctors in time. it has increased the scope of
health service we provide and also allow me to manage my team efficiently being a registered

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head nurse of the organization. However, there are challenges faced while using this technology
such as security and ethical issues. These can be managed by altering the security level of the
website and making the data encrypted. Thus, technology in healthcare needs to be managed
efficiently to make it beneficial for the patients.

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References
Alpay, L. L., Henkemans, O. B., Otten, W., Rövekamp, T. A., & Dumay, A. C. (2010). E-health
applications and services for patient empowerment: directions for best practices in The
Netherlands. Telemedicine and e-Health, 16(7), 787-791.
Brennan, J., McElligott, A., & Power, N. (2015). National Health Models and the Adoption of E-
Health and E-Prescribing in Primary Care–New Evidence from Europe.
Lau, G. J., & Loiselle, C. G. (2018). E-health tools in oncology nursing: Perceptions of nurses
and contributions to patient care and advanced practice. Canadian Oncology Nursing
Journal/Revue canadienne de soins infirmiers en oncologie, 28(2), 118-124.
Uluc, C. I., & Ferman, M. (2016). A comparative analysis of user insights for e-health
development challenges in Turkey, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and United Arab
Emirates. Journal of Management Marketing and Logistics, 3(2), 176-189.
Vayena, E., Haeusermann, T., Adjekum, A., & Blasimme, A. (2018). Digital health: meeting the
ethical and policy challenges. Swiss medical weekly, 148, w14571.
Wickramasinghe, N., & Schaffer, J. (2010). Realizing value driven e-health
solutions. Washington DC: Report for IBM.
Yusif, S., Hafeez-Baig, A., & Soar, J. (2017). e-Health readiness assessment factors and
measuring tools: a systematic review. International journal of medical informatics, 107,
56-64.