“Life-and-death decisions relating to patient acuity, treatment decisions, and staffing levels cannot be made without the assessment skills and critical thinking of registered nurses,” the union wrote in the post. “For example, tell-tale signs of a patient’s condition, such as the smell of a patient’s breath and their skin tone, affect, or demeanor, are often not detected by AI and algorithms.”
“Nurses are not against scientific or technological advancement, but we will not accept algorithms replacing the expertise, experience, holistic, and hands-on approach we bring to patient care,” they added.
While I agree AI isn’t a replacement for skilled, human nurses, there are a ton of valid implementations of AI tech in healthcare. I appreciate that they’re just advocating for collaboration with the nursing unions on how this tech is developed and implemented instead of fighting it off fully.
Having worked in this space in the past, on the document and imaging processing side. I was unaware that ai was being used in monitoring.
The dangers I see from the technology side to the end user side is, companies replying on the model data and hiring according, versus skilled nurses using their knowledge and intuition to interpret ai data and responses.
But from purely a processing scope, AI is extremely beneficial, just the lost of tribal knowledge on why we need to use ai will get lost