Nursing and technology: a dialectic.

Abstract

Caring and expertise are fundamental to nursing. Technology, although often viewed as inimical to these human qualities in the provision of care, has the potential to support caring and enhance expertise. Nurses whose expertise embraces both technology and nursing can design and implement technologies that will help them fulfill their commitments to patients. Appropriate, well-designed, flexible technologies can improve the care of individuals and enlarge the store of nursing knowledge and expertise.