Ayala Gonen

I am currently a Professor at Ruppin Academic School of Nursing in Israel where I teach nursing students and carry out research. My area of academic expertise is Nursing Informatics and currently, the main aim is to promote this field in nursing education.

My nursing career started with nursing education and throughout my nursing career I managed projects. In the beginning it started with educational projects and later on with, larger and more complicated ones. Throughout the years, I was very frustrated because most of the time I was dealing with a lot of data and busy preparing charts, figures, graphs, presentations etc.….

At the beginning of the 90's, 2 big events occurred: I got a big managing job in nursing at a large central hospital in Israel and the Information Technology started to expand in Israel.

Because I am Scorpio and I am very curios (Today we call it Innovativeness), I joined the first course of computer competency that was organized by my hospital and my eyes opened. I realized the potentials in using computers in the nursing profession and it was the opening shot of my involvement with Nursing Informatics.

I started by joining our national medical informatics group as a representative of the nursing profession and studied the health informatics domain. I was impressed by a keynote lecture given by Prof Marion Ball concerning Health Informatics and it did the change. Since then, I started to build my knowledge, skills and expertise in the area. I attended some International Nursing Informatics Congresses and was passionate about informatics. I could see how it could enhance nursing practice, healthcare and consumer outcomes. Since then, many changes have taken place to healthcare and nursing practice based on Health Information Technology and informatics from a national and international perspective.

Some of my projects included: establishing the Israeli Forum for Nursing Informatics, organizing and activating national courses for Nursing Informatics, planning, organizing, teaching, implementing and evaluating a big organizational change in the hospital; SAP – ERP software implementation. (50 hospital wards, 1500 nurses) and planning, building, updating Internet & intranet sites for the hospital nurses.

I believe that the need for innovation and integrating Nursing Informatics, have to be established within the nursing curriculum, recognizing the implications of technology on nursing students.

Today, my key focus is examining the correlation between nursing students' attitudes and a number of variables: self-efficacy, threat, challenge and innovativeness.

The objective is to graduate nurses with the requisite knowledge to fully take advantage of nursing informatics available in major hospitals and to benefit nursing educators by helping them find creative ways to expose the students to the world of information technology and to improve the quality of future nurses.

I am very proud of the development of the National Nursing Informatics in Israel and I hope that the nursing education in Israel will provide outstanding competencies in nursing informatics for nursing students.