Episode 312: Virtual Nursing in Health Care

“I think a virtual nurse can have the same sort of presence that a bedside nurse does. I like to think of a virtual nurse as pulling up a virtual chair next to that patient and spending time to ask questions and engage with them,” Laura Gartner, DNP, MS, RN, NEA-BC, associate chief nursing informatics officer for inpatient shared services and north region at Jefferson Health in the Philadelphia, PA, area told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a conversation about virtual nursing care. Music Credit: “Fireflies and Stardust” by Kevin MacLeod Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0  Earn 0.5 contact hours of nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) by listening to the full recording and completing an evaluation at myoutcomes.ons.org by May 17, 2026. The planners and faculty for this episode have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose. ONS is accredited as a provider of NCPD by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation. Learning outcome: Learners will report an increase in knowledge related to virtual nursing. Episode Notes  Complete this evaluation for free NCPD.  Oncology Nursing Podcast episodes: Episode 282: Telehealth-Based Oncology Palliative Care Episode 136: Nurse Innovators Use Telehealth to Improve Adult and Pediatric Symptom Reporting Episode 109: Is Telehealth the Future of Cancer Care? ONS Voice articles: How’s Your Video Telehealth ‘Webside Manner’? Innovative Solutions to Maximize Oncology Nurse Staffing During a Nursing Shortage Personalized Patient Education: Ensure Effective, Inclusive, and Equitable Patient Education With These Five Strategies Telehealth: The Future Is Now for Patient-Centered Care ONS book: Telephone Triage for Oncology Nurses (third edition) Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing articles: Nursing Telemedicine Educational Encounters: Improved Patient Satisfaction in Radiation Therapy Clinics Oncology Nurse Navigation: Expansion of the Navigator Role Through Telehealth Telehealth Use in Rural North Carolina Counties: Perceptions Among Patients With Acute Myeloid Leukemia Telemedicine Versus Clinic Visit: A Pilot Study of Patient Satisfaction and Recall of Diet and Exercise Recommendations From Survivorship Care Plans Oncology Nursing Forum articles: A Telemedicine-Delivered Nursing Intervention for Cancer-Related Distress in Rural Survivors Breast Cancer Survivors' Satisfaction and Information Recall of Telehealth Survivorship Care Plan Appointments During the COVID-19 Pandemic Rural Cancer Survivors' Perceptions of a Nurse-Led Telehealth Intervention to Manage Cancer-Related Distress Telenursing Interventions for Patients With Cancer Receiving Chemotherapy: A Scoping Review ONS Clinical Practice Resource: Racial Disparities in Cancer Care: Telehealth and Clinical Trial Options Jefferson Health press release: Jefferson Health Launches Virtual Nurse Program To discuss the information in this episode with other oncology nurses, visit the ONS Communities. To find resources for creating an ONS Podcast Club in your chapter or nursing community, visit the ONS Podcast Library. To provide feedback or otherwise reach ONS about the podcast, email [email protected]. Highlights From This Episode “I think that the virtual nurse plays a really important role in nurse staffing shortages. With this shortage, we need to get creative and think outside the box so that we can facilitate nurse wellness, work-life balance, and satisfaction and make our hospitals the place that nurses want to work. I firmly believe that nothing can replace the physical touch, but there are so many things a nurse does every day that can be done by somebody remotely that can reduce the workload of that bedside nurse.” TS 3:28 “About eight nurses between these two floors have volunteered to take on this role as a virtual nurse, and so they will come right from that floor. But there’s a lot of conversation about whether you should use staff from the floor, if you should use other people, things along those lines. But right now, we really hope and think that the nurses we’ve identified for this phase have a relationship with these units. They know how the units work, and that might help get everybody working together.” TS 6:37 “We found that it was really important to have a virtual knock for the patient so that you’re not just popping into a room and taking a patient off guard. Privacy features for the patient—so if there’s a camera pointing at the patient all the time, that gives a patient a little unease. ‘Is somebody watching me?’ And when we weren’t really watching them all the time; it was intermittent care, so having a camera turn away from the patient when it’s off or have a clear indicator that it’s not on.” TS 11:57 “In terms of lessons learned with the virtual staff…I don’t think that you can just take any nurse off the floor and put them behind a camera. There is a bit of a ‘webside manner,’ if you will. People need to be comfortable doing things remotely where they can’t touch the patient, or having a conversation with somebody through a camera might not be a skill that everybody has or is comfortable doing.” TS 13:39 “I don’t think a virtual nurse can replace that physical touch. What I see a virtual nurse is, is another member of the care team whose care complements the care the bedside nurse is providing. I don’t think that we should be looking to remove resources from the bedside with this nursing shortage but rather evaluate what our nurses are doing, identify if there’s tasks that someone else can do for them so that they can focus on the patient. And there are plenty of things that a virtual nurse could do so that the bedside nurse can spend more time doing quality work with that patient.” TS 21:40