I'm so happy that the RNAO has been growing in so many ways online, and has recently entered the mobile space too. They have taken their nursing best practice guidelines, which are all available online for free. The app has taken the paper copy and digitized them so nurses around the world can download the RNAO app for $0.99 in the iTunes Store.

Overall (3½/5)★★★½☆

Easy to Use★★★☆☆
Clinically Relevant★★★½☆
Practical for Students ★★★½☆

Although, I'm excited about the app, it leaves a bit to be desired which is why I'm giving it a 3½/5. It will definitely be a great resource for nurses, but the navigation will need to be improved and simplified to make it easier to use and fast enough to use in a clinical situation. As soon as you open the app it is clear that there is a lot of information. Opening menu doesn't fully explain how it works, or what the information is, but there is a search button and the submenus are fairly intuitive.

There is a lot of high level explanation and research put into each of the BPGs and they are regularly update. This is what makes the BPG great resources for clinicians and students. The information consolidates huge bodies of literature and can be a great tool for superior understand of a variety of topics that are included, such as Risk of Suicide, Selection of Vascular Access, Assessment and management of pain, and a long list of others.

If nothing else I highly recommend that nurses take a look at the RNAO website to view PDFs of all the guidelines, and if you are looking for a mobile accessible version the app is great.

As I mentioned, there are some sort comings of the application, that I'm hoping they will be working on in the future. The first things is that you need access to the internet to download the individual guidelines provided by the app. This means that the loading time for each level is a bit slow, and there are subsections of information that also need to be downloaded. This makes navigation more tedious that other apps, however, this is the largest amount of information. To be fair the other text book like information don't have better navigation, so there are not a lot of better alternatives for this much information. If future versions could provide targeted clinical applications for patient patient populations with fast navigation it would make the application much more useful in the clinical setting.

Despite the few shortcomings in the application this is a huge step forward for nursing organizations. As far as I know, this truly makes them a leader in the field. I know of a number of nursing organizations that are starting to enter into the mobile space, so although they are the first they definitely won't be the last. Hopefully this is just the first foray into the mobile space by the RNAO, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they evolve from here.