Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. Exploring Current and Future Nursing Practitioners' Views on the Future of Healthcare and Education.

BACKGROUND ChatGPT, is novel language model developed by OpenAI that has the potential to play a role in healthcare provision (Biswas, 2023). By generating a human-like text based on large amounts of data, ChatGPT has the potential to support patients, communities, and healthcare practitioners in making informed and evidence-based decisions about their health (Burger, 2020). Furthermore, this innovative language model has been recently identified as a potential threat to the educational system as it allows students to produce essays and presentations rapidly and effortlessly (Cotton et al., 2023). Similarly, educators may avail this promising system to organise ideas and produce teaching materials. AIMS This study aims at exploring nursing practitioners', educators', and students' views on how ChatGPT would potentially impact on the world of healthcare and education in the foreseeable future and the possible repercussions this may cause in the nurse-patient relationship. METHOD An observational study was conducted on a convenient sample of 177 nursing practitioners, educators, and students voluntarily recruited in a Northern Italy University. A 45 items online questionnaire based among others on multiple choice and Likert-type questions was administered in April 2023. CONCLUSIONS AI is an emerging concept that has been gaining importance in recent years among the nursing community. In fact, almost half of the sample stated of being familiar with it and with its implication in clinical practice. Furthermore, 27% of the respondents believe AI has the potential to improve the quality of nursing care even though only 7% of them uses it frequently. Interestingly, 53% of the participants think AI has the potential to ameliorate both clinical outcomes and job satisfaction. A significant part of our sample (65%) believes AI might limit the interaction between the nursing team and patients thus dehumanising nursing care. Conversely, 64% of our sample considers AI has a great opportunity to enhance patient monitoring and consequently provide safe care. Lack of financial resources and internal resistance within the profession do pose a threat to AI implementation for well the 64% of the respondents. Generally, AI is considered as a precious opportunity in nursing education for the vast majority of our sample. In fact, 64% of the participants would be willing to introduce AI in clinical placement even though they do not have any previous experience in this regard. In this area, AI could support clinical reasoning process 58% of respondents say. Although, this seems to contradict the idea that AI would negatively impact the possibility of acquiring relevant clinical information by limiting social interaction. AI is a relatively new technology that elicits a great interest among students, educators and practitioners while creating a strong educational need. It is no surprise that 85% of the sample perceives AI as an essential area to focus on in a lifelong learning perspective. Further studies are recommended in order to explore more in details the nursing community needs and reshape the future of nursing care and education in a more technologically advanced manner.