Daniyah Ahmed

I am a neonatal nurse by background and a PhD researcher in computer science at Newcastle University, based in Open Lab. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a staff and charge nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in Saudi Arabia, where I was involved in the implantation phase of electronic health record (EHR) systems within the unit. I also hold MSc in Advanced Nursing Leadership from the University of Edinburgh.

My PhD sits within health informatics and explores how neonatal nurses experience EHR usability and how these systems fit into day-to-day clinical work in intensive care. I focus on the realities of documentation and information access in the NICU—what helps nurses, what slows them down, and where system design creates avoidable pressure at the bedside. Through my hands-on experience with EHRs, I have seen how easily nurses’ concerns can be overlooked, and I want my research to bring nurses’ voices more clearly into digital health research and design. As my project develops, I aim to turn nurses’ experiences into practical, nurse-centred recommendations, with the longer-term goal of improving safety and workflow efficiency in neonatal care—so that nurses’ needs genuinely shape how EHRs are designed and improved.