In an Age of Technological Advancements: Ensuring that Caring Remains in Practice

Chapter Eight explores how technological advances enhance healthcare delivery but also create new challenges for nurses. Caring as technology refers to the meaning of health care delivery in relationship to technology. Many benefits of technology in health care include, expediency of care delivery, improving the working conditions of nurses, safer learning opportunities for student nurses, and decreased overall costs for health care. There are also some draw backs such as, a decrease in direct communication, a negative impact on relational practice, an increased risk of privacy violations and the loss of nursing jobs. It was pointed out that, in modern health practices the nurturing aspects of caring for the ill or aged is increasingly viewed by some institutional bodies as less important than other more mechanistic aspects of service. Modern advances of science have also somewhat blurred the boundaries of when life begins and when it ends. Nursing the dying person can be difficult for nurses. No matter how many future changes occur the challenge to the profession of nursing is not to lose the capacity to care. Mindfulness was recommended as a tool to help nurses to connect with their clients in a caring way. In the Case in Point a distraught family member shares her story of how it felt to be left in the dark about the imminent death of her loved one.

Keywords: Affirmation, Caring as technology, Futility, Morbidity, Mortality, Mindful listening, Robots, Simulation, Virtual reality.