Predicted Influences of Artificial Intelligence on the Domains of Nursing: Scoping Review.
Christine Buchanan, M Lyndsay Howitt, Rita Wilson and 3 others
PMID 34406963WHAT IT FOUND
Little direct evidence describes how AI may influence compassionate nursing care.
Robots dominated included work. Potential benefits were more nurse time and comfort; risks included deception, tension, infantilization, privacy harm, and unclear accountability.
Key findings
01The review retrieved 131 articles, and most examined the influence of robots on care delivery.
02One study reported that a predictive algorithm reduced decision-making time for nursing diagnoses from 35.5 min to 19.8 min.
03Included literature raised risks of agitation or distress when robots were removed, deception if patients cannot recognize robots are not real, privacy breaches, and unclear responsibility for errors.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Computer science and engineering databases were not searched, so relevant technical studies may be missing. Non-English papers were excluded and reference lists were not searched, so some relevant articles may have been missed. For the compassionate care question, articles about caring were generalized to compassionate care because direct literature was scarce, relying on reviewer judgment. The reviewers checked agreement with a simple percentage rather than a stronger statistical measure. The included evidence is heterogeneous and includes reports, editorials, and opinion pieces, so it does not establish patient-care effects.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that AI or robots improve nursing care or reliably free nurse time. The review mostly maps predicted influences and heterogeneous literature, with few direct studies of compassionate care, so it cannot show effectiveness.