Peter Murray

Chief Executive Officer, International Medical Informatics Association

I first became involved in nursing informatics before I knew what the term meant, or that it even existed. In the mid 1980s, nursing informatics was a relatively new term, not widely known or understood among clinical nurses, even those with interest and involvement in the use of computing and technology within nursing and healthcare. Working in hi-tech areas such as coronary care, I became more interested in two areas that have been constant themes in the 30 years since – patient information and professional education, both of which are important aspects of nursing informatics. I became increasingly interested in how we could use the information we were collecting about cardiac patients to personalise the materials that we were giving to support their rehabilitation, and tailor it to their individual needs; even just using paper recording, and without the computers that we would use today to collect and analyse this information. This theme has continued, in various guises, through my interest in the quality of online health information in the 1990s, and into my continuing interest in personal health records, and patients being at the centre of care processes.

Even before I qualified as a nurse, I was involved with the education of peers and junior staff; this continued as I moved to work in coronary care and in parallel, I became more involved in distance education through my own studies at The Open University in the UK. This interest grew into exploration of how electronic communications (such as email discussion lists) and eventually the World Wide Web could be used for education, not only locally, but internationally. These interests focused the research for my masters and PhD studies, and have influenced my engagement with various formal and informal mentorship schemes, where I have tried to, hopefully positively, develop the next generations of our colleagues.

In parallel with these developments, I became involved with the nursing informatics group in the UK, the British Computer Society's Nursing Specialist Group, and especially work they were doing around education. This eventually lead to my engagement in nursing informatics internationally, including meeting, in person, many of the international colleagues with whom I was engaged through email in the previous years, and who had influenced my activities and thinking, ie who had been unwitting mentors to me.

While many of my interests have remained broadly constant, others have ebbed and waned in terms of the activity I have been able to put into them. I have been able to be actively involved in the use of free and open software within healthcare, the developing possibilities of social media, and the emergence of ehealth and mhealth.

I think that my experience demonstrates two main points – one, that there are many aspects to nursing informatics, and thus many different opportunities to become involved; and two, that serendipity often outweighs any planned direction, and can lead to more opportunities than one ever imagined. Many of the things that I have done in the past 20 years or more have been as a result of being in the right place at the right time, and seeing and taking hold of the opportunities available. If anyone had asked me 20 years ago where I would be and what I would be doing now, I don't think my current work would be within the realm of what I would have predicted. I hope that my experience, which may be quite different from the focused body of work that others have persevered at, shows that there are many opportunities within the world of nursing informatics.