Nearly 60% of Nurses Don’t Feel Fully Trained on the Tech Their Jobs Demand (New Survey)

A new survey of 465 registered nurses finds that most don’t feel fully prepared to use the technology their jobs now require. Nearly one in three has never used an AI-powered tool at work, even as artificial intelligence spreads rapidly through the health systems that employ them.

The survey, commissioned by Carrington College and fielded in June 2026,, found that only 40.5% of nurses feel fully trained on the technology required for their role. Another 52.2% describe themselves as only somewhat trained, 5.7% say they are not adequately trained, and 1.6% report receiving no training at all. Taken together, nearly 60% of working RNs say they fall short of full technological preparedness on the job.

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The survey doesn’t find nurses complaining about technology itself. In fact, 86.4% of nurses say technology has somewhat or significantly improved their efficiency, and 78.2% point to documentation and charting as the task most improved by digital tools.

The friction is how new tools arrive. One-third of respondents (33.8%) named lack of training on new tools as one of their biggest workplace technology challenges, and 33.4% said nurses are not given adequate input when new technology is implemented at their facility. More than half (54.1%) described their workplace as gradually adopting new tools while training programs fail to keep pace, leaving nurses perpetually catching up to systems already in use around them.

The result is a workforce that likes what technology can do but is left to learn much of it on the fly, from EHRs and barcode medication administration to the electronic documentation systems that now shape nearly every shift.

Asked to name their biggest workplace technology challenges, nurses put basic reliability at the top, ahead of any complaint about the tools being too new or too advanced:

Source: Carrington College Nursing Technology Survey, 2026. Respondents could select multiple challenges.

And the frustrations reach the bedside: 33.9% of nurses say technology has somewhat or significantly decreased the time they spend with patients, and 54.2% report having had to delay or modify patient care because of a technology issue.

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The most striking number for anyone watching healthcare AI: 32% of nurses surveyed have never used any AI-powered tool at work.

That figure lands differently when you set it against what hospitals are actually deploying. Nurse.org’s Nursing AI Watch, our ongoing tracker of AI in nursing practice, has confirmed 127 AI deployments across 106 large U.S. health systems, spanning ambient documentation, clinical decision support, and predictive staffing tools. AI is in the building. Whether nurses have been trained on it, told about it, or asked about it is another matter, and the survey suggests the answer is often no.

The gap matters because the accountability doesn’t move. When an AI tool drafts a note or flags a chart, the nurse’s signature stays on the record. In that environment, training isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the safety layer.

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About the Survey

The survey was commissioned by Carrington College, a nursing and allied-health school established in 1967 with campuses across California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oregon. Respondents were 465 verified registered nurses recruited through Prolific’s pre-screened participant pool and surveyed via SurveyMonkey in June 2026; respondents were anonymous and not affiliated with the college.

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