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The Nursing Executive at a large tertiary hospital was concerned that nurses using smartphones on duty could be distracted and more vulnerable to clinical error. However, the nursing executive also recognized that smartphones could deliver on-the-job benefits. As a result, they were unsure how best to manage smartphone use. To guide policy, we designed a questionnaire study to survey nurse smartphone use and attitudes towards use at the hospital. Results showed that 57% of the 299 respondents did not carry their phones on duty. There were significant positive correlations between reported frequency of use and nurse unit manager (NUM) attitude, with most NUMs banning cell phones. Nurses found smartphones disruptive and inappropriate while delivering patient care. However, many nurses liked to be contactable by family/friends, and technically competent nurses used phones for work purposes. Age and technology acceptance were significantly negatively correlated, and use/technology acceptance was more prevalent among younger nurses than their older colleagues. The adoption of smartphones by younger nurses suggests that policy should be formulated around allowing phones.

Medical image watermarking has been proposed as an appropriate method for enhancing data security, content verification and numerical image fidelity. Due to the sensitive nature of the data, medical image watermarking requires that any additional information that is stored within an image must not affect the perceptual integrity of the image.In typical approaches, additional information is generally hidden in the entire image, or in the background regions of an image (so as not to affect the medical data). This paper presents a novel model whereby medical image regions are watermarked differently so that perceptual degradation due to watermarking is limited. The model partitions images into regions and characterises each region according to some feature(s). Each region is then watermarked with a particular watermark method and payload capacity such that perceptual degradation is limited. This paper presents the model in conceptual form and then uses one instance of it to demonstrate how it would be used in practise. Results on MR and CT images demonstrate that less visually sensitive areas on images can be watermarked using more robust techniques and more sensitive areas can be watermarked using lighter or no embedding.

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Research into the development and adoption of new health technologies finds that information and communication technology (ICT) developers often fail to understand the clinical workplace, resulting in the implementation of costly systems that stakeholders reject. Here we report observations of the implementation of a well-designed new patient information system at a regional hospital. We used a combination of ethnographical and survey methods to assess stakeholders‘ uptake of and reactions to the new system. We found that even with a well-designed system, uptake can encounter challenges. We outline a number of important factors that may influence the success, or failure, of new ICT.