Shaping Our Nurses of Tomorrow Through Innovation, Passion and Dedication

The challenges ahead

As we head towards the end of year 2022, Singapore would have toiled and fought against COVID-19 for close to three years. The pandemic has brought tremendous stress to the healthcare system and its workers. Globally, there are signs of a pandemic receding and returning to normalcy is within reach. However, now other challenges arise – challenges that have been clouded by the pandemic.

Being a city-state, Singapore is not spared from the impending silver tsunami, or more commonly known as an ageing population. People are living longer, and often burdened with chronic diseases. Demand for healthcare service will increase, compounded by changing consumer habits brought about by the pandemic. Our healthcare system needs to transform to continue bringing accessible and value care in a cost-effective and sustainable manner.

As Singapore embarks on its HealthierSG initiative for a long-term and profound reform towards preventive care and population health, General Practitioners (GPs) will play a bigger and much significant role to keep our population healthy, while delaying the need to consume acute tertiary care service as much as possible.

Yet, bridging this paradigm shift may transcend across professions. Healthcare professionals are akin to the artery and blood of a living being. It oxygenates various organs and keep them working in sync for our desired function. A much-needed healthcare transformation would inevitably require its professionals to ride these challenges together to re-examine ways of doing things better and differently while embracing technological advances.

Unlocking the potential of nurses

Nurses continue to form the largest base in the healthcare workforce and remains a critical backbone of any healthcare system (in the world). However, with declining birth rates and increasing demand for qualified nurses, demand will very soon outstrip supply - there just won’t be enough nurses to go around. Internationally, we are already seeing intense competition for nurses amidst global nurse migration exacerbated by trend set forth by the pandemic. With the limited number of nurses we have access to, how might we tackle incoming healthcare challenges head-on?

Innovate - to transform their professional environment and unlocking their potential to work meaningfully, upskill and stay valuable.

Creative Confidence

Reminiscing of my career, I saw first-hand the creativity of nurses through a series of showcase, challenges and celebrations within the hospital. When empowered, nurses can do wonders. They were able to improvise, visualise their ideas and iterate their solutions based on users’ feedback to solve problems they faced in their daily work. In today’s context, we intimately recognise this as the design-thinking approach.

What if we could harvest and translate these collective creativities into better ways of delivering care for patients, and if we could revive that burning creative confidence in nurses to solve issues they are facing on a day-to-day basis?

Co-designing Processes, innovating at the heart of where care is delivered

Today, we see many nurses, juniors or seniors alike, working hand-in-hand to tackle perennial issues surrounding their scope of work. This involves co-designing new work processes to eliminate waste and optimising them for efficiency and productivity. Other times, innovating and designing products with the facilitation of the Nursing Innovation Bunch (NIB) alongside industry leading partners or small medium enterprises (SMEs).??

These frugal innovations (FI) often pale in comparison to larger and more sophisticated state-of-the-art inventions involving cellular therapeutics and robotic surgery tools with razor sharp precision. Nonetheless, the value it brings to staff or patients remains immeasurable. In our journey to bolster nursing innovations, seed funding was provided to enable nurses to tinker and visualise their ideas.

Prior to pandemic and at the peak of this momentum, we saw an average of 100 ideas submission to translate their idea to solutions. This critical mass of improvements, innovation and thinking out of the norm can have a significant impact and nudge us closer to unlocking the potential of nurses – keeping them relevant in their field, and motivated at their impact.

Beyond FI, as part of co-designing work processes and productivity, nurses augment high tech solutions such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, automation and emerging technologies into their routine work to deliver better care. Riding onto digitalisation, changing consumer expectations of healthcare services and technology maturity, care could be delivered in smarter, safer and predictive manner. Environmental sensors can augment nurses with an extra pair of eyes, ears and hands through intelligent ambient sensors and robotics.

Nurses can continue to create value by leading and co-leading innovation efforts to transform care, and the by-product of such transformation efforts can lead to redesigning of roles, and the ability to practise beyond the pre-defined realm of nursing. Most importantly, nurses can continue to play a pivotal role by participating and providing inputs to shape how technology can be adapted for today’s practice and tomorrow’s possibilities.

The future of nursing is an exciting one with immense opportunities brought by innovation. “Nurses beyond nursing, and nursing beyond nurses” is no longer a farfetched ideology, but just a stone’s throw away.

Read more on GovInsider: https://bit.ly/3ELfKS2

This article was written by Nat Liew. He is currently a Nurse Manager in the TTSH Nursing Services and a member of a newly assembled unit, Nursing Innovation Bunch. He also serves as an innovation faculty under Centre for Asian Nursing Studies (CANS) to promote innovation success and facilitate collaboration in Asia. His innovation interests include re-designing nursing care through design-led methods augmented with emerging technologies. He also serves as an Associate Faculty at the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) for design-led innovation for undergraduates, including nurses.