A comprehensive review by Abdullah Gerçek and colleagues explores the integration of AI-supported language models, specifically ChatGPT, into the nursing profession. The article systematically examines the applications, benefits, and significant challenges of this technology across three core areas: nursing education, nursing research, and clinical practice. The authors argue that while ChatGPT offers revolutionary potential, its adoption must be guided by a careful, critical, and ethical approach to preserve the humanistic essence of nursing.
1. ChatGPT in Nursing Education
The article highlights that nursing education must evolve with contemporary technologies to prepare nurses for a dynamic healthcare sector. ChatGPT is presented as a powerful tool for modernizing pedagogical methods.
- For Educators: ChatGPT can assist educators in preparing course outlines, developing subject-related content, creating academic presentations, and designing problem sets. It allows them to generate personalized learning materials, which frees up time to build more meaningful relationships with students. The model can also help design complex clinical cases for simulations without needing to search the internet or adhere to pre-prepared texts.
- For Students: ChatGPT offers a personalized learning experience that overcomes the limitations of traditional classroom instruction. It provides a platform where students can interact with course material at their own pace, ask questions without hesitation, and receive instant answers. This fosters a student-centered environment and supports the development of clinical reasoning skills in a safe, controlled setting. It can also help students by analyzing their assignments for grammar and clarity, thereby reducing the grading workload for educators.
2. ChatGPT in Nursing Research
The authors assert that tools like ChatGPT can support researchers at every stage of the scientific process, enhancing efficiency and productivity.
- Initial Stages: The model can assist in identifying research topics by analyzing literature to find current knowledge gaps. For systematic reviews, it can help select appropriate keywords, structure research questions, and even create initial drafts of the title, abstract, introduction, and discussion sections.
- Data Analysis: In qualitative research, ChatGPT can be used to summarize interview transcripts and propose initial thematic codes and analysis matrices. It can also help generate basic codes for statistical software like SPSS, R, or Python, and suggest methodologies for quantitative analysis, though expert supervision is recommended for mathematical precision.
- Final Stages: The tool is also useful for preparing ethical documents, research posters, and conference abstracts. The authors emphasize that ChatGPT should be used as a time-saving auxiliary tool that helps develop ideas, but researchers must maintain a supervisory role over its outputs.
3. ChatGPT in Clinical Nursing Practice
In the fast-paced clinical environment, ChatGPT can serve as a valuable supportive tool for nurses.
- Clinical Decision Support: It can provide rapid information to help classify and prioritize symptoms or offer recommendations based on clinical guidelines, which is particularly useful in critical care settings. However, the article strongly states that ChatGPT should only be an advisory tool, and final clinical decisions must be based on professional expertise and patient-specific data.
- Documentation and Patient Education: ChatGPT can efficiently handle time-intensive tasks like preparing discharge summaries (epicrisis reports), care notes, and educational brochures. It can create simplified and customized patient information materials, which is especially effective for increasing treatment compliance among individuals with lower education levels.
- Communication: By generating responses to likely patient questions and developing scenarios for role-playing, ChatGPT can help enhance nurses’ communication skills.
Challenges and Limitations
Despite its many advantages, the article dedicates significant attention to the disadvantages and ethical concerns associated with ChatGPT in nursing.
- Accuracy and Reliability: A major concern is the risk of ChatGPT providing incomplete, misleading, or outdated information, as it may not have access to the most current medical research. It can also generate non-existent or inaccurately cited resources.
- Ethical and Privacy Concerns: The integration of ChatGPT raises issues related to data security, patient privacy, and the potential for technological biases.
- Lack of Empathy: The authors stress that ChatGPT cannot replace the human and emotional elements essential to nursing. Skills like empathy and interpersonal communication are fundamental to the profession, and the model is limited in reflecting these emotional dimensions.
- Risk of Over-Reliance: There is a risk that students may become overly dependent on ChatGPT, which could weaken their independent learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The article concludes that ChatGPT offers significant opportunities to enhance nursing but should not substitute professional judgment or human compassion. The authors recommend that its integration must be managed with a professional and ethical mindset. Key recommendations include:
- Establishing clear ethical guidelines for its use.
- Incorporating AI literacy into nursing curricula to educate students on its responsible and critical use.
- Ensuring that AI-based systems are used to complement—not replace—human clinical judgment to maintain high-quality, safe, and human-centered healthcare
Reference: Gerçek, A., Çiftci, N., Durmuş, M., Sarman, A., Taşcı, Ö., & Yıldız, M. (2025). ChatGPT in nursing: Applications, advantages, and challenges in education, research, and clinical practice. Annals of Biomedical Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-025-03832-w