Profile of Wahab Osman

PhD student wins SDGs@UofT Student Award

27 January 2025

Wahab Osman a PhD student at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing has successfully won the SDGs@UofT Student Award in support of his research evaluating the impact of electronic health records on the quality of nursing care documentation  in Ghana.

These awards are given to graduate and undergraduate students whose research is aligned with one or more of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and are part of U of T’s commitment to advance SDG related research at the university.

“It’s been incredible to have this recognition of my research, especially as this is a university-wide competition,” says Osman, “I am grateful for the support of my supervisor Dr. Charlene Chu who encouraged me to submit this application.”

In 2020, Ghana implemented a new nation-wide e-health records system, a significant shift away from paper-based documentation which had been used for centuries. This decision was aimed at improving the speed of clinical care decision making, in addition to allowing health care providers to see a patients’ complete health history at the click of a button.

Osman was chosen to be on the implementation committee for this new e-health record system at one of Ghana’s teaching hospitals, and he recognized the potential positive impact of this technological advancement. However, he had not seen a concerted effort to evaluate just how this shift in documentation had impacted the largest contingent of health care providers in the country, nurses. Nursing care documentation is critical, he says because the care that nurses give is based on care decisions that are informed by continuous appraisal of documented patient care information, forming the basis for quality nursing care.

“With any significant change in healthcare, if it impacts negatively on the work processes of the largest group of health care workers, nurses, it will inevitably impact the quality of health care. That is why I am evaluating the quality of nursing care documentation to measure the impact of the e-health record system on an important component of nursing care, nursing documentation, and how we can optimize, improve and sustain its gains,” says Osman.

His research aligns with SDG 3 – as it is aimed at supporting safe and effective patient care through the proper use of technology in the health care system. His study also aligns with SDG 9 and 10, in its evaluation of improvements in infrastructure and technology and its potential to reduce inequalities in care provision.

Osman says that Ghana’s use of the current comprehensive electronic health records system and other advanced technology in the health care space is in its infancy, and he has heard anecdotally of the challenges some nurses face regarding equipment issues, software glitches, a lack of informatics skills and network downtimes, which prevent the full use of these systems and threaten their sustainability.  This Osman says, makes it even more critical that any implementation of technology is assessed appropriately to ensure it is optimized for use in healthcare in settings, especially in resource constrained areas.

“Understanding how nurses view and use this new technology to address potential inequalities in rural areas and deprived communities is also important and can help bridge that gap of inequality of healthcare access,” says Osman.

In addition to the potential for improvements in clinical care, Osman notes that the e-health record system is also imperative to advancing health systems research. Now researchers like Osman have access to thousands of clinically related data which they can analyze to solve problems both clinically and within society.

Looking ahead, once Osman has completed his PhD research, he plans to examine how patients engage with the technology in clinical settings and also how e-health records can be optimized in training the next generation of nurses and midwives.