Issue #8 Week of Oct 05, 2026 – Oct 19, 2026
This issue centers on nurses' readiness for AI and testing AI tools against real work. Several papers measure digital literacy, competence, or anxiety among nursing and allied health students, generally finding that ethics-focused and cognitive literacy matter alongside technical skill. A second thread tests large language models on nursing text, including handover transcripts, discharge letters, and free-text care notes, with mixed accuracy and ongoing uncertainty about clinical readiness. A third thread examines decision support design and use, from a long-term care prototype to participatory design practices and ICU nurses' experiences with AI and missed care.
Papers dropped sharply to 12 this issue (-25). Workforce & Education remains the leading topic, continuing last issue's focus on literacy and readiness, though with fewer papers overall. NLP & Generative AI gained ground, now testing concrete tasks like handover extraction and discharge letters rather than general attitudes. AI Ethics & Governance, a major thread last issue with seven papers, is absent this time, and AI Methods & Evaluation does not appear either. Clinical Decision Support continues but shrinks from 10 to 3 papers, now including implementation and participatory design questions rather than prediction-tool comparisons.
How this digest is made: Papers retrieved bi-weekly from the community-configured sources (PubMed, arXiv, medRxiv, and/or CINAHL — see Digest Settings for this issue's exact sources) using search terms agreed at AINurse-26. Results are restricted to English-language papers; both title and abstract are checked independently, and either being predominantly non-English excludes the paper. Papers are then classified against the community's chosen topics — anything that doesn't clearly match is left out of the issue rather than shown as "Other." Summaries are generated by Claude Sonnet, constrained to report only what the abstract states, with no speculation or inference. The "At a Glance" section above is written under the same constraints — the model synthesizes themes only from the summaries included in this issue, and every number in it (counts, changes since the previous issue) is computed directly from the archive, not by the model. Flagged items indicate incomplete abstracts or unverified peer-review status.