October 20, 2022
Established at the UNC School of Nursing in 2020, the EmpowerEd Initiative has provided every incoming undergraduate nursing student with an iPad since it launched, bringing the count to nearly 450 tablets this fall.
Dr. Maureen Baker, director of EmpowerEd and associate professor at Carolina Nursing, teaches two undergraduate courses and is now designing course materials and assignments specifically for iPads.
“This technology has elevated our culture of learning,” says Dr. Baker, who has seen this improvement in her classroom. “Having the iPads allows everyone to use the same technological tool and really raises the level of active learning and student engagement.”
An Elevated Culture of Learning
Carolina Nursing faculty have seen a shift in how students engage with their course materials since the initiative began.
“They’re no longer just passive recipients of nursing content — they’re becoming creators of content,” explains Dr. Baker. “This is very similar to what they’ll have to be doing in professional practice in terms of understanding their patients’ and families’ learning styles and catering in a creative and innovative way to get the important information to their patients.”
Isabel Daumen, a senior in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program, explains that she — like most of her classmates — now prefers to take all her class notes using the iPad.
“It gives me the opportunity to draw diagrams,” she explains. “For pathopharmacology or anatomy, or a description of a surgery, it can be really helpful for me to see it visually and make connections from one drawing to another.”
Mya Yorke is a senior in the BSN program and she says the iPad has helped her stay organized as she balances her busy schedule. This semester she began keeping her iPad in her coat pocket to take notes in the clinical settings.
“I can definitely see this benefitting me down the road, and I’m just really thankful to have the opportunity to work with something like this,” says Yorke.
We have exceptionally talented students. They’re bright, innovative, and creative. We’re giving them a platform for them to shine, and they’re stepping up.
Dr. Maureen Baker
Teaching Technology
But students aren’t the only ones who have adapted to using iPads in the classroom. Dr. Elizabeth Stone, assistant professor at Carolina Nursing, teaches three undergraduate nursing courses. “The iPads are used differently in each course,” she explains.
In her pediatric critical care elective course, for example, students use iPads to demonstrate how they would educate a hypothetical patient about a condition or procedure using Simply Sayin, an app that helps nurses explain diseases, treatments and procedures to children and their families using simple terms and pictures.
Carolina Nursing faculty are working together to create new educational tools using the iPads. To teach health assessment skills, Dr. Baker and Assistant Professor Dr. Susana Barroso-Suarez have developed an electronic health record that mimics what students would see in the hospital. Using an iPad, students can listen to different heart and breath sounds while interviewing a mock patient.
“This helps students get used to documenting electronic health records,” explains Dr. Barroso-Suarez. “They gain more experience in the technology of nursing. Anything that we can do to create those hands-on experiences puts them ahead of the curve.“
The initiative is also piloting using the iPads beyond the classroom in the clinical setting. For one course, students use iPads in pediatric clinical studies at UNC Medical Center to complete their clinical practice worksheet, look up lab values and evidence-based articles, take notes, and record post-clinical reflections.
The Growing Demand for Technology in Nursing
The demand for nurses is on the rise in the United States. According to a 2022 McKinsey & Company study, the nation may have a gap of between 200,000 to 450,000 nurses by 2025, and North Carolina alone faces a shortage of 12,500 nurses by 2033.
To meet this demand, the US would need to double the number of nursing graduates it produces each year, but technological innovations could also play a role in supporting the nursing workforce and closing the gap. Tools like telehealth, telesitting, artificial intelligence, and mobile staffing apps could alleviate some of the effects of the nursing shortage by improving nurses’ workflow and making patient care easier.
Carolina Nursing is carefully studying this shortage and preparing to find innovative solutions to meet the rising demand. The EmpowerEd Initiative is just one of the ways the School is preparing graduates to meet the growing health care needs of patients in and beyond North Carolina.
“More and more, when you look at advanced practice nurses, nurse practitioners are taking notes on their iPads when they go on rounds,” says Dr. Barroso-Suarez. “They used their tablet to document on the spot what’s going on with their patients, to look up labs, to have everything at their fingertips. So anything we can do that gets them used to using technology from the health care perspective is huge.”
Dr. Barroso-Suarez is excited to be a part of the initiative as it moves forward. “What limits us is our imagination. There are so many places where we can take this iPad initiative and continue to have it grow.”
The School of Nursing is on track to become an Apple Distinguished School in 2023 and will begin the application process later this fall.
