a robot nurse would do assessments, charting, put in and remove IVs, perform nursing interventions. the "robot nurses" you found clips for performed a small portion of what nurses, or even CNA's would do. even insisting that those were robot CNA's wouldn't do justice to the work CNA's do moment to moment. lets start with perfecting a mail room courior bot before we get ahead of ourselves with this. i could see a "robot" doctor becoming a reality a lot sooner than a robot nurse, just because of the manual labor that can be involved in many daily activities a nurse provides. i'll clarify befor the flaming begins.... i think a lot of the decisions about a patient that a doctor provides could be performed remotely vs a lot of what a nurse provides. for instance, looking over labs and diagnostic test results, and even communicating with patients could be done using existing technology, but installing an IV or even detangling a line would take resources that would make it prohibitive. i could see how having an expensive doctor working remotely over several locations could seem appealing to bean counters, wheras a nurse on site wouldnt be as cost prohibitive.
Pamac,
Your perspective on robotics is a very common misperception. A robot doesn't have to perform every function that a specialist performs for specialists to lose their jobs.
Let me explain how this works so that you can get a better perspective on what I'm referring to.
Begin with a hypothetical of 1,000 nurses (or any other specialist in any field) performing a wide variety of functions (lets say 50 functions each) that as a whole, cannot be easily duplicated by a robot.
Now, one or more robots are made (lets say 5) that can perform between 1-3 functions.
That is,
robot A performs functions 1-3,
robot B performs functions 4-6,
robot C performs functions 7-9,
robot D performs functions 10-12,
robot E performs functions 13-15
Clearly, those 5 robots cannot replace a single human nurse than can perform 50 functions.
This is how job loss occurs (by the way, while this example is hypothetical, I have first hand knowledge):
Those 1,000 nurses no longer have to perform those 15 functions (out of the 50 they each perform). Now each nurse performs 35 functions.
1000 nurses x 50 functions = 50,000 functions before robot introduction. 100% nurses requirement.
1000 nurses x 35 functions = 35,000 functions after robot introduction. 70% nurse requirement.
From a management perspective, they needed the 1000 nurses to perform the 50,000 functions, but as you can see, they no longer need 1000 nurses. They can rearrange work around the robot(s) and have the nurses perform the functions that the robots cannot perform.
So after robot introduction, they can eliminate 300 nursing positions (30% of workforce), and still accomplish the same level of work.
You may object and speak to robot malfunction, error, etc. though generally, human "malfunction", error, etc. is higher.
There will always be nurses, just like there are bank tellers today, but tell me, how many bank tellers would there be if there were no ATMs?
