JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The growing presence of digital technologies in healthcare requires the health workforce to have proficiency in subjects such as informatics, which is one of the core competencies of the nursing profession. This brings consequences to the education of new nursing students as their preparedness to use these technologies in clinical situations is something that course administrators need to be concerned with. Thus, investigating the students' attitudes toward technology could be used to assess the student's needs regarding this proficiency.

Objective:

This study aims to investigate attitudes, enthusiasm, and anxiety towards technology in nursing students of three educational institutions in Sweden and Poland; and to identify factors that could be associated with those.

Methods:

Nursing students at two universities in Sweden and one in Poland were invited to answer a questionnaire. Data about attitudes towards technology, eHealth literacy, electronic device skills, frequency of using electronic devices, as well as sociodemographic data were collected. Descriptive statistics were used to characterize the data. The Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient and Mann–Whitney U test were used for statistical inferences.

Results:

646 students answered the questionnaire, 342 from the Swedish sites and 304 from the Polish sites. It was observed that the students’ technology enthusiasm was on the higher end, while anxiety was on the mid-range of the scale. Age was a significant factor associated with technology enthusiasm and anxiety for the Swedish students (older sample). eHealth literacy and technology skills were associated with both technology enthusiasm and anxiety; while frequency was not significantly associated, except for the computer case. Technology anxiety was found to decrease in higher semesters in the Swedish case. Lastly, gender differences were evidenced for technology anxiety, but not for enthusiasm.

Conclusions:

This study presents observational evidence on the importance of considering the nursing students’ attitudes towards technology and identifies their needs in terms of technology savvy while approaching health technology subjects in the curricula.