Nurse informaticians in Finland - who are they and what are they doing?

The role of a nurse informatician is not yet common in health care settings in Finland although electronic patient records have been in use since 1980's. A web-based survey instrument was compiled based on the surveys conducted by HIMSS in spring 2009. The aim was to find out what kind of positions nurses have in nursing informatics in the Finnish health care sector. Based on the results the role of nurse informaticians varied between hospitals and health centres based on organization size and affiliation weather on IT-department or clinical setting. In many organizations nurses are also working quite isolated due to scarce number of nurses in the field of informatics.