Ida Marie Soliven

I am Ida Marie Soliven, a Filipino nurse working in a busy emergency department in booming and vibrant Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Prior to that, I worked for 10 years as a primary and urgent care nurse in a remote clinic in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. My varied work experiences have allowed me to learn about nursing care in a truly multi-cultural environment. It has been a challenging but definitely enriching. For the longest time I have had a passion for computers and so decided to get some specialized education. I enrolled in post-graduate studies with a focus on nursing informatics. Everyone asks me what this field is all about; they think it's a bunch of nurses pushing paper and stacking records behind a desk. It's a crude analogy and - with the advent of information technology - it is an outdated one. The biggest thing one learns in informatics is about transformation. Nurses deal with so much information at any one time and constantly juggle that information to determine how best to provide nursing care for their patients. Currently, I work at a government clinic whose robust information system has government facilities from the whole emirate sharing one electronic health record for each of their patients. It is an amazing feat to have a truly mobile health file. The benefits of that are obvious and it is incumbent upon nurses who constantly and continuously access these files to ensure that their documentation reflect the efficiency and quality of their work and I think that still remains to be seen today. I just finished my masters and look forward to helping the organization build a better nursing documentation system.

LEADERSHIP EXEPERIENCE:

• POCT Link Nurse - 8 years
• Shift in charge - 6 years
• Nursing Competency Assessor - 2 years
• Nursing Practice Committee Member - 2 years
• Nursing Practice Committee Secretary - 1 year
• Nursing Preceptor - 1 year