While computer systems to document nursing care have been in existence since at least the early 1960’s, it was only in the early 1980’s that we began to formally define and describe the emerging discipline of nursing informatics. Since those early days, nurses in many parts of the world have taken leading roles in exploring, implementing, researching and promoting the use of a range of increasingly computerised, and increasingly networked, technologies to support the delivery of nursing and all other aspects of healthcare. Nurses and nurse informaticians have long recognised that simple technical and technological solutions will not address the problems of the world’s health services,.
