Commentary on Eley R, Fallon T, Soar J, Buikstra E & Hegney D (2009) Barriers to use of information and computer technology by Australia's nurses: a national survey. Journal of Clinical Nursing 18, 1149-1156

The increasing introduction of IT in healthcare demands changes in evaluation approaches to move research from a purely descriptive approach to an understanding of how IT systems are implemented and integrated in clinical practice.

Attitudes have already been identified as a key aspect but perhaps of less interest nowadays where, as Eley et al. (2009) suggest, general attitudes are changing with the increasing introduction of computers in daily life.

On the contrary, with the wide introduction of IT systems in clinical practice, another issue that needs to be considered, when analysing attitudes, is the difference between attitudes and satisfaction.

Studies measuring attitudes pre- and postimplementation show conflicting results, but to what extent can postimplementation measures, when they focus on IT systems in clinical practice, be considered attitudes Smith et al. (2005) measured nurses’ attitudes before and after the implementation of an IT system and found a decrease in attitude scores. Nevertheless, we can suppose that, once nurses have used an IT system, what they are doing is evaluating their experience, it is more a measure of satisfaction than a measure of attitudes towards the introduction of IT systems in practice.

CITA DEL ARTÍCULO  J Clin Nurs. 2009 Apr;18(8):1226-7