I feel guilty as I write this. You see, I’m home with my family, safe and warm. Protected. Others, my comrades and fellow nurses are not. But I can guess, and have read and been informed of what they are facing on the front lines: reassigned to new hospitals and new duties, rendering care, sometimes coerced by employers, without adequate protective equipment. No masks. No gowns. No testing to know who is indeed positive for the virus. One of my students wrote to me, expressing her ethical dilemma of whether to care for patients while she went unprotected, potentially cross-pollinating other patients and her family. They – her employers – had reminded her that she has ethically pledged to do so. Her note brought it to a personal level to me. What could she do, she asked me? I advised her to document, to bring others into the demands of adequate protection, and to consult the CDC guidelines, contact her county health department and so forth. I felt my advice was not nearly enough, a defective response to an impossible riddle.
We are in a pandemic, a global disaster, if you will. The United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction: International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (2017) defines disaster as:
A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts. Annotations: The effect of the disaster can be immediate and localized, but is often widespread and could last for a long period of time. The effect may test or exceed the capacity of a community or society to cope using its own resources, and therefore may require assistance from external sources, which could include neighbouring jurisdictions, or those at the national or international levels (n.p.).
That about sums it up, doesn’t it? But what of the nurses’ psychological trauma experienced in the disaster?
My student described insufficient resource trauma, the lack of tangible and intangible resources necessary to render safe and quality care. The resources include knowledge, supplies, nursing staff, and other professionals.
Physicians are often tasked with triaging during disasters as the resources become more strained. But I have met with nurses who were involved in the California fires not too long ago. They felt forgotten and overlooked when the post-fire debriefings took place, as if their place in the healthcare hierarchy removed them from sitting at the healing table.
Another graduate nursing student emailed me about her class assignment. She probably won’t be able to finish it because of all the activities she is being called to do in her hospital, an ever changing world filled with chaos and uncertainty. When I weigh the final paper with saving lives, is there any doubt about what priority I should endorse? But this is territory I’m unfamiliar with.
What I can do is remind myself that my world should be revised, amended, and my teaching should be trauma-informed. I should lace my work with compassion and an understanding of the overwhelming need for people to feel safe, their voices to be heard, and their recovery to be purposeful and inclusive. I can give names to the trauma they are exposed to and by doing so, offer them a path to express this psychological injury now and in the future so that recovery can unfold.
References
Foli, K. J., & Thompson, J. R. (2019). The influence of psychological trauma in nursing. Indianapolis, IN: Sigma.
United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction. (2017). Terminology. Retrieved from: https://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/terminology.