“Life-and-death decisions relating to patient acuity, treatment decisions, and staffing levels cannot be made without the assessment skills and critical thinking of registered nurses,” the union wrote in the post. “For example, tell-tale signs of a patient’s condition, such as the smell of a patient’s breath and their skin tone, affect, or demeanor, are often not detected by AI and algorithms.”
“Nurses are not against scientific or technological advancement, but we will not accept algorithms replacing the expertise, experience, holistic, and hands-on approach we bring to patient care,” they added.
Those are all good points but that assumes that hospitals will use AI in addition to the workers they already have. The fear here would be that they would use AI as an excuse to lay off medical staff, making the intentional under staffing even worse and decreasing the overall quality of care while absolutely burning through medical staff.