Artificial intelligence (AI) offers incredible potential to improve health on a global scale, and ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, shows great promise as a convenient and accessible way for nursing students to access information and practice their clinical skills using ChatGPT-assisted learning in nursing education.
Cara Lunsford, RN, CPHON, is the vice president of community at Nurse.com, where she fosters a community where nurses can find peer support, allies, professional opportunities, resources, and education. Lunsford has 16 years of experience in acute care, home health, and home infusion settings.
Daily Nurse spoke with Lunsford about using ChatGPT in nursing education, the role of nursing educators in an AI world, and lessening the digital divide to make technological advancements accessible for all.
What follows is our interview, edited for length and clarity.
How has AI integration become more prevalent with technological advancements in the healthcare field?
AI supports simulations to give students and clinicians more practice in safer environments before they begin working with human beings. AI also can bring a broader range of knowledge together more quickly for potential further exploration of the best course of action. Additionally, as ChatGPT becomes more accurate and reliable, students can use it on their own time and in a private setting. They’ll likely feel more comfortable asking questions without fear of judgment from instructors or other students.
How can AI be used to improve health on a global scale?
The demand for healthcare will only continue to increase across the globe as the population ages. However, with challenges related to staffing for both nurses and physicians, AI presents opportunities to reduce costs for organizations and limit exposure to contagious diseases, especially in underserved areas of the world.
Patient populations are also becoming more complex, and we will continue to face increasing global health challenges, such as COVID-19. People will continue to travel more than before. Viruses will spread more quickly than we can keep up with. However, we can provide global health equity with immediate access to evidence-based best practices that will eventually be available through AI. As a result, we can save hundreds of thousands of lives.
Does ChatGPT provide students a convenient and accessible way to access information and practice their clinical skills?
As ChatGPT becomes more reliable, it will allow nursing students to build clinical and interpersonal skills in a more controlled setting. Whether simulating patient interactions or explaining a clinical procedure, ChatGPT has the potential to be an excellent resource for basic information that nursing students can use as a starting point and then expand their knowledge.
Talk about the potential for ChatGPT-assisted learning in nursing education.
ChatGPT could create scenarios or personas for students as they think through the best course of action in providing care for an AI-simulated patient or communicating with a simulated family member. Additionally, ChatGPT can help summarize complex topics in courses nurses often find challenging, such as chemistry or pharmacology. Having a non-textbook take can help break learnings down into digestible pieces.
What are the potential misuses of ChatGPT in nursing education?
Using the current iteration of ChatGPT to diagnose or provide care plans would be dangerous. The information provided by AI can be a valuable time saver; however, the results of queries can contain outright errors. While ChatGPT has numerous advantages, you can run into ethical issues in nursing education, such as plagiarism or cheating. ChatGPT can create unique pieces that include scientific data depending on your prompt. However, it removes the essential components of completing your research, compiling your data, and formulating your thoughts. It can be a slippery slope. On another note, when ChatGPT creates each text, it may be missing critical elements like tone, which makes writing more authentic and personal. ChatGPT lacks empathy – something all nursing students need.
What are some of the potential limitations and fallacies in the use of ChatGPT?
As noted, the current iteration of ChatGPT sometimes contains errors in answers to queries. Also, the software cannot currently provide citations for the source of the information in its responses. In nursing education, this has a dangerous potential for students to act on erroneous information. Student nurses will continue to need guidance from educators with years of experience who have well-developed judgment and hands-on knowledge of nursing protocols and pitfalls. ChatGPT cannot also pull recent data. Students seeking information on recent clinical trials or new protocols for patient care might receive responses needing more current data.
As AI continues to develop, will it replace educators in the future?
While AI has advanced rapidly, it’s unlikely it will completely replace human educators in the near future. Educators provide more than just information; they’re mentors, counselors, and more, to their students. Human educators can also empathize with students, bringing creativity and critical thinking to the learning process, which isn’t what AI is known for. Education is a social process, and human interaction, especially in medicine, is essential for effective learning. While AI has its growing list of uses and benefits in the educational realm, it can’t fully replace in-person interaction between educators and their peers, educators and their students, or the human perspective. Right now, AI can serve as a tool to augment the work of educators, providing personalized and adaptive learning experiences and automating routine tasks. This gives educators time to focus on providing their students mentorship, support, and guidance.
Additionally, nursing education is all about hands-on clinical experience. Student nurses stand to absorb more information and build more confidence through hands-on clinical experiences with nurse educators at the helm. While ChatGPT is a helpful piece of technology and can aid in giving students further academic support, it can’t replace the one-on-one guidance they receive from their nurse educators during their most formative years in nursing.
If acquiring knowledge becomes increasingly accessible, what will be the role of higher education in an AI world?
Making knowledge more readily accessible is a good thing. You might ask an AI tool: Give me three options for providing care to this person in this simulated scenario. Compiling knowledge and ideas more quickly can aid life-saving actions. But it can also empower life-threatening actions if misused. Nurses must have supervised early experiences to build their expertise. They need sounding boards and critical feedback as they develop their nursing skills. When a nurse returns to school for an advanced degree, it validates employers and peers that this person has gained access to a certain degree of information that will help them advance in their career. A BSN, MSN, or PhD will still stand as a confirmation that a nurse has not only received the higher education but that they were able to apply it to their practice and demonstrate an understanding of that information. Higher education is vital to developing good nurses we can trust to do the best for their patients.
Does this mean that training critical thinking, rather than delivering the content of the class materials, becomes more important than ever?
Critical thinking and gut instinct have always been vital for nurses, which is necessary for good problem-solving. Student nurses must be aware of anything that rings alarm bells, just as it is for experienced nurses. As general content becomes more available through AI, it will be imperative that nursing educators use their time to help students hone their critical thinking skills and instincts. If something seems off, asking a more knowledgeable nurse, or getting a second opinion, is a good course of action. However, nurses must think quickly and act based on their knowledge and experience. Using AI for information gathering and suggesting solutions can be a time saver, but relying on AI for clinical decision-making could have tragic outcomes.
How should we evaluate students’ competency in acquiring knowledge in the classroom? For example, should we start implementing traditional paper and pencil formats for exams?
At every level, we have to trust nurses to make ethical decisions. For student nurses, knowing how to find reliable sources and remember evidence-based practices is crucial to their future careers and the safety of their patients. So, digital exams are still valuable. Requiring students to cite their answers’ sources can ensure they know how to find the information they need to succeed in nursing.
The best kind of competency evaluation for nurses still resides in clinical practice and access to simulations. Instead of going back to paper and pencil, we should look at ways of harnessing technology so we can place student nurses in virtually realistic situations so they can make real patient care decisions.
While we are making concerted efforts to address health disparities and promote equity globally, do you see the advancement of technology further widening the digital divide across populations with various socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., age, socioeconomic status, and geographic locations)?
Like every tool and skill, that depends on how we put the technology into practice. Technology can help spread the word about differences in populations and individuals more quickly. For instance, it can help us recognize disease trends in certain populations. It can help more people around the world be aware of cultural resistance or preferences for communicating, being approached by caregivers, and receiving care. In the past, some research findings used male populations and extrapolated those results to females. With technology, we can share broader and specific knowledge more quickly and widely. That, in turn, allows critical and sometimes opposing views to be shared more quickly, adding to critical thinking and sparking further research. While there will always be those that embrace or resist new technology, it also raises the question, is it accessible? Creators of technology, like ChatGPT, place themselves in unique positions to deliver information and services more quickly. However, it’s essential to recognize what must be done to make technological advancements accessible for all. For example, internet access is still not as widely available in certain geographic areas, creating limitations for populations living there. As a result, healthcare resources such as telehealth services become more limited and inaccessible for those populations. I believe steps have been taken to make healthcare resources and services through technology more equitable to these populations, but more work needs to be done to lessen this divide.
