Bundle of Rays

Wrapping up a few days in Townsville with the team at James Cook University's School of Medicine.

This trip has been packed with quality meetings across leadership teams and wider faculty, exploring how XR, AI agents, and immersive content can transform healthcare education — from occupational violence training through to curriculum-integrated simulation.

A huge shout out to Nikki Harvey, whose research project is at the heart of why we're here — investigating how immersive content can be embedded into the distributed medical undergraduate curriculum. This is our core research collaboration, and the potential to improve outcomes for students training across regional and remote sites is exactly what gets us out of bed in the morning 😉👍

The conversations have been sharp, the energy has been real, and I'm leaving with a full notebook and a lot of momentum.

Townsville, you've been unreal. 🌴

I keep hearing the same line:
“AI can assist nursing, but it can’t replace it.”

And I understand it. Nursing is human. It’s presence, judgement, sitting with someone when they’re scared. No machine replicates that.

But I wonder whether “can’t replace” is a truth — or a comfort line. History shows us that structural shifts don’t ask permission.

Horses didn’t negotiate with cars.
Blockbuster didn't outpace Netflix

They were replaced because the system evolved.

So the real question isn’t what AI is capable of in 2025.

It’s what it may be capable of by 2035 — and whether nursing leadership is preparing for that horizon.

AI one day triages more accurately than an overstretched ED team…
it conducts consistent first-pass telehealth assessments…
it detects deterioration earlier through pattern recognition…
it provides meaningful companionship in moments of isolation…

Do we pre-emptively limit it to “assistant”?

Or do we rigorously shape it to improve care? Full view, open mind, utter industry change?

Australia will need tens of thousands (75,000) more nurses in the coming decade. Demand and complexity are increasing. Burnout is real.

I feel leadership isn’t about defending current boundaries. It’s about designing the future responsibly.

“Should AI replace nurses?” is the wrong question. It immediately frames a fight.

A better one could be:
Can AI improve patient care?

If the answer is yes — even partially — then our responsibility is not fear or protectionism.

It is preparation.

The 2035 conversation starts now.

For the comments -

Are we designing nursing for 2035 — or defending it in 2025?

AI HealthcareInnovation

I just finished reading a recent systematic review on the plane on the way home looking at AI in teaching and teacher professional development.

It analysed 95 studies over the past decade.
What struck me wasn’t what it said about tools. It was what it revealed about imbalance.

Most of the research focuses on how AI is being used in classrooms — chatbots, automated feedback, lesson planning support, assessment generation.
Far fewer studies look at how educators themselves are being supported to develop real capability with AI.

And that gap feels even more significant in nursing.

In our world, AI isn’t just helping draft lesson plans. It’s creeping into documentation systems, triage processes, decision support tools, predictive analytics, simulation design.
We’re talking about systems that can influence clinical thinking.

Yet professional development often still looks like:
“Here’s how to use ChatGPT.” “Here’s a quick demo.” “Here’s what not to do.”
That’s not development. That’s orientation.

The review also points out that most AI-related professional development is short-term. Intervention-based. Measured immediately afterwards. Rarely longitudinal.
But judgment — especially clinical judgment — doesn’t develop in a workshop.

In nursing education and hospital systems, the real question isn’t whether students will use AI.
They 100% will.

The question is whether nurse educators and clinical educators feel confident enough to:
Know when to trust AI.
Know when to question it.
Know how to teach students to override it.
Know how to discuss bias, error, and algorithmic limitation without fear or defensiveness.

AI literacy in healthcare cannot be about prompts. It has to be about professional responsibility. If AI is going to shape the future of care, then educator development has to come first — not as an afterthought once the software is installed.

Nursing has always adapted to complexity.

This is just the next layer.

Reference:
Tan, X., Cheng, G., & Ling, M. H. (2025). Artificial intelligence in teaching and teacher professional development: A systematic review. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 8, Article 100355. https://lnkd.in/gFzZKMuy