An equally good beginning student in the same class may have little or no computer background. This wide range of computer and health care informatics knowledge exists throughout nursing. There are valuable nursing leaders with little or no background in computing. At the same time nursing is well represented at the international level in the leadership circles of health care computing. In discussing this question remember the goal for nursing is better health care.
Nurses learn about health care computing in order to provide for better health care.
The reverse is not true. They do not learn nursing theory in order to do health care computing. At the same time we are reaching the point where nurses can not provide for safe care without understanding basic health care computing concepts. Because health care computing is tied to a rapidly changing technology some version of this problem will always be true. Pharmacology has presented some of the same problems for nursing.