Kaiser Permanente nurses demonstrate on the streets to tell the world about their worries that some healthcare facilities are putting huge emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) to replace human nurses. This protest follows the recent survey by National Nurses United, which highlighted the underlying fears among nurses as they think of ways its implementation may affect their patients.
Nurses Give doubts concerning Patient Security
Study results from study is that 60 % of the surveyed members of the National Nurses United do not trust either their employers or the AI technology to prioritize patient safety. It is the lack of trust that arose as a result of the perception of the staffing shortage and neglect on the part of the authorities, who became prominent during the events of COVID-19.
Nurses felt and expressed that hospital administrations are at fault to a great extent for the neglect of staffing shortages and inadequate supply management initiatives, which erode their trust in hospitals’ administration structures.
In addition, nurses at Kaiser Permanente are scared of losing their jobs due to AI mergers because these technologies are capable of replacing the nurse’s job. Between the current 40% of respondents indicating that they were researching how to adapt their employees to changes in electronic health records, technological replacement anxiety emerges. Nurses fear AI increases the chance of medication errors to a more serious level, including a patient being attended to the wrong surgery room or lacking medication just at the time when it is urgently needed.
Conflicts of AI-enabled patient evaluation
AI algorithms have been a subject of discussion, approximately 50% of results show the hospitals that are into AI deployment for recognizing patient priority levels are outsourced by their nursing staff.
Two-thirds of that sampling were not so happy with the accuracy of machine-made measurements, putting apart AI assessments and extending the gap of disagreement to their clinical evaluations. Nurses state that artificial intelligence often cannot take into account all of those minute observations and critical thinking that nurses use to make decisions and, therefore, might compromise patient safety.
AI projects have been significantly criticized, more specifically towards AI initiatives introduced by Kaiser Permanente. One such project involves the application of an AI algorithm to read text messages from patients and to grade the importance of the responses from medical data.
In certain cases, nurses, including Cathy Kennedy, president of the California Nurses Association, have even claimed that the dependence on AI algorithms to replace human triage nurses is simply inappropriate and can result in putting patients’ lives at risk. Besides, it has been questioned whether the in-time data transfer for AI’s generated reports from the nurses is a reliable option when hospital nurse staff turn out to be underemployed.
