Picture someone who works in tech. They might fit a stereotype: heavy-rimmed glasses, hoodie, T-shirt branded with a startup’s logo, male. You probably don’t imagine a nurse.
Yet integrated electronic health records, wearables, health-monitoring apps, artificial intelligence, 3D printers and telemedicine are just some of the technologies that have entered the clinical environment.
Robots are already operating in some hospitals across Canada. The nurses of the future could be the next app developers, data analysts, coders and artificial intelligence experts.
Read more at https://www.utoronto.ca/news/why-nurses-future-need-embrace-high-tech
But what’s the culture like? I’m in the UK. I was a nurse in the ED for 7 years. I went back and did a physics degree in my spare time and an MSc in physics and engineering in medicine at UCL where I got a distinction for my project, 3D mapping in surgical robotics. I had to leave because doctors would just look at me blankly, and I got nothing for my studies. I now develop machine learning algorithms for a financial tech firm in central London. It’s very easy to talk this game, very hard to implement systems and projects.