Best of both worlds: digital health and nursing together for healthier communities.

AIM: This manuscript offers a set of practical recommendations to the nursing and digital health communities in order to achieve a common vision of nurses fully engaged with and leading digital health solutions for universal health coverage. BACKGROUND: Nurses comprise the largest occupation of health workers in the world and play a central role in efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Nevertheless, though they are essential to delivering health care, nursing voices are too often absent in the design and implementation of new technology and digital health advances. The World Health Organization recognizes digital health as a critical catalyst for advancing universal health coverage and the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, the use of digital health by nurses is globally recommended as a channel of practice to strengthen nursing services and allow practitioners to significantly improve health outcomes. SOURCES OF EVIDENCE: Websites of the World Health Organization, United Nations, peer-reviewed research search engines, as well as the experiences of both authors. DISCUSSION: Digital health is transforming the entirety of the healthcare provision system and these systemic changes require engagement, leadership and championing from nurses. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING PRACTICE AND POLICY: Both the nursing and digital health communities have much to gain from each other and can be stronger together. The authors offer a set of practical recommendations for both the nursing and digital health communities to implement to optimize mutual efforts towards achieving universal health coverage.

Nurse-Led Forensic Services for Foreign-Born Torture or Abuse Survivors Seeking Legal Immigration Relief: Results of a Feasibility and Acceptability Study.

BACKGROUND: In 2017, a team of forensic nurses in Maryland launched the first known nurse-led and managed service delivery program designed to meet the unique medicoforensic needs of immigrant survivors, including asylum seekers, in their community. The expanded suite of services involved conducting forensic physical evaluations, which included medicolegal history-taking, head-to-toe forensic physical assessment, photodocumentation, and presentation of related findings in the form of written affidavits for use in applications for legal reliefs in immigration court (e.g., asylum, T or U visas, Convention Against Torture). METHODS: Case-based data for patients served as part of the program (n = 8), and semistructured interview data were collected from key service delivery stakeholders (n = 5) to assess the feasibility and acceptability of this pilot program. RESULTS: Eight asylum-seeking patients received medicoforensic nursing services between May 2017 and December 2018. Key benefits of services to clients included accessibility to timely, trauma-informed care by a professional nurse at no cost and with flexible scheduling. Furthermore, the skill sets required to conduct forensic physical evaluations were found to align with sexual assault and forensic nursing scope of practice. CONCLUSION: Forensic nurses are well positioned to fill current service delivery gaps to meet the medicolegal needs of this vulnerable population in civil court proceedings. Recommendations of this study may be used by other forensic nurse teams to inform the design and implementation of initiatives to expand the core services of a forensic nursing program to include asylum and immigration-specific medicolegal care.