Ben Gran: Bridge the gap: Let nurses innovate!

I love nursing, and I also love innovation. However, often when I speak about innovation within the field of nursing, I’m met with “Aghh.” And it’s understandable. Innovation and technology within the healthcare sector is growing really fast, and sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to keep up with the new technologies. And now, as a new professional within the field, I’m slowly starting to relate a little bit more to this response. Us nurses are already really busy. We’re not offered the opportunity to innovate, and quite frankly, we’re not paid enough. However, if we could change this attitude of innovation earlier on during nursing education, I believe we could have our future nurses innovate in a way to improve the working quality for healthcare professionals, which in turn will improve patient care. This is the key to making our future nurses the stakeholders within the future development of the healthcare system. So, what is innovation? It’s a bit of an ambiguous word that can mean a lot of different things to many different people. But simply put, innovation is looking at a problem, understanding it and trying to make it better. And if you make it better, that’s innovation. Innovation can be applied to something which already exists or can be used to develop something completely new. But before we go deeper into this topic, let me tell you the story which inspired me to have this speech here today. When I started my final internship for my nursing studies at the end of 2020, I had an interview with the ward manager on the first day. One of the questions which she asked me was, “So Ben, where do you see yourself going in the next five to 10 years?” Honestly, I had to think about it for a little while, and then I told her, “Well, to be honest, I don’t think I can be a nurse forever. It’s really hard work, like, really, really hard, both physically and emotionally. But I am passionate about healthcare and would love to pursue a future career in healthcare innovation and technology.” And yes, I know some of you might think it’s a little bit strange for a near graduate to be planning on leaving his career on the first day of his internship. And you know what she said? Well, she said, “Oh, I see. I’m not too sure about this whole innovation thing. I’m not really a big fan.” Whoa! Okay. I was taken aback. See, that’s what I wanted to do. The egotistical part of me wanted to say, “What do you mean you don’t like innovation? You don’t want to improve the working quality for healthcare professionals, which in turn will improve patient care?” Well, I didn’t say that, obviously. Instead, I asked her one simple question, and that was, “Why?” And what she told me gave me the biggest light bulb moment. She said, “Well, too often a businessperson or an engineer comes to me with a new technology or innovative idea, and more often than not, it’s not very user-friendly or it just adds more to our workload.” Okay. So I’m standing there and I’m thinking … ding! This is the moment that I realized there’s a huge disconnect between the developer and the end user within the healthcare sector. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten this kind of response. Throughout my studies and now my career, I’ve often recognized that there’s a bit of a frustration factor whenever new technologies or processes are introduced. So, on our days full of taking and making reports, taking patients’ vitals, communicating with doctors, physiotherapists, family members, taking patients’ vitals again, and charting and “God, am I forgetting something?” Well, that’s honestly on a good day. But most of the time we’re covering for our colleagues who are away on sick leave due to burnout, taking on extra administrative roles because hospitals are trying to save money and answering call bells. (Sigh) The call bells … especially to independent patients who all of the sudden can’t do anything for themselves anymore. So if there’s anybody out there who knows a nurse, which most of you probably do, go ahead and ask them to share a story with you about call bells and these kinds of patients. They’re often quite amusing, but at the time, oh, so frustrating! So yeah, adding a new technology or process on top of all of this, especially one that’s going through beta stage flaws, only adds on to the headache. And you see, nursing’s changing. It’s not the same that it was 20 to 30 years ago. Neither is the healthcare system, and it seems like education is not quite caught up. A lot of new technologies are being introduced and most of the nurses’ time is still spent completing mundane and repetitive tasks. In addition to this, we’re seeing an aging population, we’re seeing an increase in the cost of care, patients’ needs are more demanding and a shortage in healthcare staff. However, we could have these repetitive and mundane tasks of charting aided by AI and technologies as small as a ring taking patients’ vitals. This would hopefully leave more time for nurses to communicate and provide care for their patients, but also give them an opportunity to solve problems within their organizations. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that by 2030, there’s going to be a healthcare shortage of 27 million workers globally. That’s five times the population of Finland, with 9 million of those being nursing-specific. This is caused by experienced nurses coming towards their retirement, a poor retention rate of new professionals and less people entering the field altogether. It’s not looking very good. So, we’re at a point now where we can no longer wait and see if these advancements will happen in the healthcare sector. We’re at a point now where these advanced technologies have to happen. We need to fill most of these 27 million vacancies. But we can also see a reduction in that total number through technologies which actually reduce the workload of nurses. But who are the ones who should be driving these advancements in technologies? Well, the answer is frontline healthcare workers, nurses. We’re the ones who have been using all of the technologies introduced thus far. We work with them every day, see where their flaws are, and some of us might have pretty good ideas on how to make them better. But most importantly, us nurses are the ones who truly understand what aspects of our jobs can be replaced with future technologies. If we can combine the frontline experience of nurses with the innovative approaches of businesspeople and engineers, just imagine the improvements we could see. We could actually start solving the problems nurses face every day by including them, the end user, within the development phase. So that comes now to my main question: How do we solve this multidimensional issue? It is quite a big one. Well, a good start would be by looking into our education system. From my experience going through my bachelor degree in nursing, they take a bunch of nursing students where a nurse in the front of the class teaches them about nursing. And it makes sense! But what this does is, it creates a nursing bubble within the university, and sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to penetrate that barrier. What it does is, it narrows your path to where what you learn is only useful for that profession without exploration of problem-solving within the industry. As a nursing student going through a bachelor degree, you're merely handed the tools and taught how to use them. There’s very little emphasis on being able to look at that tool and thinking: “Aha! This would work much better if it was made like this.” And here’s the thing: universities are networking havens. We’re literally working in establishments where we have people working on business and marketing, IT, engineering, design, culture, healthcare. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. As a student, I was lucky enough to be part of the group who were really keen on extracurricular innovation projects. We had a diverse group of students: myself, a nurse, two industrial designers, a cultural manager and a health tech engineer. This experience taught me so much about the importance of networking and how to work within a multi-professional team. And I couldn’t help but think that every single student should have an opportunity like this and solve real life problems. But most importantly, it showed me that we needed each other to make this project become alive. During the same time, we also established a non-profit which looked at enriching the innovative and entrepreneurial culture amongst the university students. I was lucky to have an experience like this. And I should acknowledge that there are the beginnings of innovation education within nursing studies. But it's at its infancy stage and not held as a priority within the classroom. So, if there’s any nursing educators out there - In fact, all educators, who aren’t already doing this, If there’s one thing I would like to ask is that you let your students out of that bubble. Make them professionally mix and match, interact, network and work on projects with students going through different courses within your university. From my experience in the projects that I did with my colleagues, I can see a huge benefit in this kind of cross-course collaboration. What might come out of it can be truly special, and the connections you get from them can last a lifetime. Now, when you really think about it, how can we develop easily adoptable technologies for nurses if we never get a chance to learn how to really sit down and work within a multi-professional team? So, in our future careers as healthcare professionals, when we come across a potential problem, we can draw from those past experiences and networks we gained as students to at least get started with the innovation process. Now, there are many barriers nurses and health tech developers face within the healthcare sector. Educating our nurses about innovation and what’s to come in the future of the healthcare system, we can slowly start to make them the stakeholders within the strategy. However, education is not an end-all solution. The solution lies in a more integrative approach where education, technology, governance, leadership, laws, finances are all taken into consideration. But these are all entire TEDx talks in themselves and outside of my personal experience. So, if there’s anybody listening who’s an expert within the field, I would like to invite somebody to come up here and speak about how we can start solving these issues. We need to get this ball rolling because time is seriously starting to run out. And now for myself as a new professional within the field, if there’s a message that I would like to share, that is that, if you’re a startup, innovator, businessperson, engineer, or anybody working on a healthcare related technology or service, is to get in contact with the nurse. Ask us, how can this product or service be made better to suit our needs better? Trust me, we want to help. That’s kind of why we’re nurses to begin with. (Laughs) And while I'm on the topic, I would also like to encourage nurses and students to get more involved, find like-minded people in societies. These might be in the hospital you’re working for or within your local university. And if you have a business or innovation idea, share it! Speak to people and find other services within your community. There are healthcare related hackathons, incubators and other services to help you construct these ideas better. Now, studies have shown that innovation empowers nurses when it looks at ways of improving patient care, technologies and processes. However, this is only possible with financial support, healthcare leaders promoting environments where intellectual creativity is promoted and employees get the recognition and prestige that they deserve. However, time and time again, when I've spoken to nurses as a student and now as a professional, it seems like there’s something preventing nurses from achieving this. There’s something fundamentally preventing nurses from innovating more. Well, nurses are overworked, burning out, underpaid, often unappreciated with their own organizations, especially within the public sector. But most importantly, we aren’t offered the opportunity to truly demonstrate our potential. Now, as AI and technologies assume many tasks of nurses in the near future, we need to educate and facilitate our future nurses to be the stakeholders within the future development of the healthcare system. Our future nurses will be the healthcare information integrators, healthcare consultants, health coaches and providers of human care, supported by these technologies and AI, not replaced by them. After all, one of the first human interactions you have in life is with a nurse in the maternity ward, and one of your last will be with a nurse by your bedside. The way we support our nurses in society is a choice. So please, help us nurses, so we can help you innovate. Let’s build a better future together. Thank you. (Applause)