E-Nursing: Experience Platform for Improving Nursing Performance

Abstract

Nurses gain knowledge and experience through the performance and on the job learning. They improve their professional level by gaining more experience from “what they learn” in practical situations. Hence, the quality of their performance is improved through on-the-job learning, i.e. learning by doing over time. The focus of this paper is on the extraction and the formalization of nursing experience, using a semantic based framework. Experience based Nursing Portal (E-Nursing) is established with a premise that an interactive nursing environment requires knowledge-based approaches. The nursing knowledge portal is used for integration of nursing experiences by means of dynamic nursing profiles. Nurses with different professional levels transfer their experiences into the portal repository. Those experiences will be gathered in a standard context, documented and used for evolutionary revision of the nursing ontology by domain experts. Thus the E-Nursing facilitates the knowledge transfer to novice nurses, and acquiring of experience from expert nurses. The innovative characteristic of the concept is related to incorporating the both types of knowledge, explicit and implicit. E-Nursing, thereby, provides a tool to document, represent, and formalize the experiences of nurses obtained within the nursing process during their professional lifetime.