A nursing informatics response to COVID‐19: perspectives from five regions of the world

Abstract

The 21st century has seen several infectious disease outbreaks that have turned into epidemics and pandemics including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which began in Asia in 2003 (Poon, Guan, Nicholls, Yuen, & Peiris, 2004), followed by H1N1 that emerged in Mexico and the United States (US) in 2009 (Belongia et al., 2010). Next came the lesser known Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) originating in Saudi Arabia in 2012 (Assiri et al., 2013), after which the Ebola outbreak in West Africa took place from 2014– 2016, with a more recent occurrence in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2018–2019 (Malvy, McElroy, de Clerck, Günther, & van Griensven, 2019). To date, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that started in Wuhan, in the Hubei province of China, in late December 2019 seems to be eclipsing all of these previous infectious diseases in terms of its global reach and impact (Wang, Horby, Hayden, & Gao, 2020). After being declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a public health emergency on 30 January 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020c), it was elevated to a pandemic status on 11 March 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020d). As of 28 April 2020, there are more than 2.9 million cases and 202,597 deaths reported worldwide (World Health Organization, 2020b). Healthcare workers around the world, for example nurses, medical doctors and community healthcare workers are on the front lines caring for those infected (Zhang, Sun, Latour, Hu, & Qian, 2020), whereas epidemiologists, public health officials, and others work behind the scenes to control the spread of COVID-19 and protect population health. Scientists across many disciplines are also researching how to address the myriad problems that this disease has created and exacerbated, such as the shortage of personal protective equipment (Chughtai, Seale, Islam, Owais, & Macintyre, 2020), the need for more critical care facilities and expertise (Grasselli, Pesenti, & Cecconi, 2020), the development of therapeutics (Dhama et al., 2020) and new vaccines that could prevent the virus in the future (Anderson, Heesterbeek, Klinkenberg, & Hollingsworth, 2020). Nursing informaticians who use information technology to enhance nursing education, clinical practice and policy are collaborating with colleagues and contributing to and leading research and digital health initiatives in the face of COVID-19. Here, we discuss some perspectives from nursing informaticians based in nine countries across five regions of the world (Ronquillo, Topaz, Pruinelli, Peltonen, & Nibber, 2017). We explain how the nursing informatics community is responding to this global crisis and offer some early lessons learned that could be useful in future outbreaks of infectious disease.