I couldn’t answer for my current job, as a College Instructor, as I’m a newbie to it, (just over a year). But in my years as a nurse there were some dramatic changes because of technology.

One of my first jobs as a nurse, before I’d even written the licensing exam and qualified as a nurse, was working for this big, gruff, old-school doctor in his clinic.

Dr. Rich is synonymous with our city, a legend of sorts because supposedly he moved here and worked at the mine to put himself through med school. Then proceeded to dedicate his entire career to the citizens of Thompson. He looked more like a trucker than a doctor.

He had a private practice and I was hired to call his patients into the rooms, do a set of vitals (blood pressure, temperature, pulse) on them and get any other items ready he might need.

He was old school. And cheap. We used an actual mercury filled thermometer. How embarrassing. On babies, a rectal thermometer.

The hospital was a bit more advanced. We used digital oral thermometers and automatic sphygmomanometers, or blood pressure machines. (Dr. Rich made us use the old fashioned, pump up the bulb and use a stethescope kind of blood pressure machine.)

Eventually we evolved to tympanic thermometers for checking temps (in the ear), which we thought was really amazing.

Nowadays checking temps involves a simple scan of the forehead with an infrared thermometer. It takes seconds. Completely nonintrusive.

Checking a BP also takes seconds and involves simply wrapping a cuff on an arm and hitting the start button.

Charting is largely electronic nowadays too which makes it so streamlined and accessible.

I remember how scary it was, the day we “went live” with electronic medical records in the specialist or consultation clinic I was working in.

I hadn’t minded paper charts at all. I loved flipping through the papers, using stamps and inkpads. It was all reminiscent of being a little girl and pretending to type on my Mom’s blender, imagining I was some type of secretary or something.

Along came electronic medical records or EMR and all the stamping “faxed”, “copy”, “original”, went out the window. Seemed so scary to just throw caution to the wind and type all of this very important and personal information on a computer and NOT make copies. What if the system crashed?

Anyway, that was fifteen or so years ago and EMR has only gotten better and better.