Elizabeth (Liz) Cummings

I became interested in informatics after 20 years working in acute care as a nurse and midwife. At that time I had a young family, worked part-time and decided I wanted to do something for myself. So I enrolled in a university degree. I didn’t want to do nursing studies, I wanted something completely different. My undergraduate degree included majors in information technology and computing, and public policy. This got me really interested in how technology and information could impact nursing and healthcare in the future. After completion of my under-graduate degree I was invited to undertake an Honours degree in information systems. The Honours degree included a major research project. My research involved conducting an evaluation of a recently implemented statewide pharmacy information system. I was hooked on health informatics.

During my time at university I continued working part-time as a midwife (on permanent night-shift). But following the successful completion of my Honours degree I opted for another change and was employed as the strategic information systems officer for a statewide non-government organisation responsible for the computerisation of General Practice throughout the state. I also was responsible for a number of implementation projects including enabling electronic communication of emergency department information from the public hospitals to general practice, and the virtual amalgamation of two rural general practices to enable the GPs at one practice to view the patient records held at the other practice.

However, university called again so after 3 years I returned to university to undertake a PhD. My research here aimed to see if online symptom monitoring could assist people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in home-based self-management of their condition. This is when I really started to re-engage with the nursing side of life. My focus for this, and much of the subsequent research, was on patient outcomes rather than systems level outcomes. After completion of my PhD I continued as a researcher conducting and managing a wide range of health informatics projects. After 5 years an opportunity arose to move to the school of nursing and midwifery. This led to an increased focus on nursing informatics and when the new course was being developed we had the opportunity to be the first Australian university to incorporate informatics, and an electronic medical record, into our under-graduate nursing degree. I was also lucky enough to be able to co-ordinate the e-health degrees and work on redeveloping them.

I am now semi-retired, moving towards full retirement, with most of my work being voluntary. I continue to supervise PhD and Professional Doctorate candidates and publish regularly. I am currently working on a project for the Australian Digital Health Agency through the Health Informatics Society of Australia which is developing a national nursing and midwifery digital health capability framework. I am deputy chair of Nursing Informatics Australia, the Australian country representative on the IMIA NI SIG and an heavily involved in the organisation of the 15th International Congress in Nursing Informatics (IMIA NI2020) to be held in Brisbane, Australia in July 2020.

I continue to be amazed and inspired by our up and coming nurse and midwife informaticians and see their increasing engagement in informatics at all levels has the ability to revolutionise healthcare. Nurses and midwives must be encouraged and equipped to contribute to the design and implementation of a new healthcare paradigm and nursing informatics education is an essential element for this.