Contributor: Navninder Kaur, MSN, CMSRN
It all started in January of 2020 when the news started circling around about a contagious viral disease spreading in the East. The situation was not much of a concern, with a thought that just like other diseases like SARS, which originated and spread in one region, it will subside soon. However, as essential resources like gloves, masks, and hand sanitizers started disappearing from store shelves around the last week of February, and come March, our hospital had its 1st case of COVID-19. Soon, things got chaotic and out of hand, when we started running out of PPE’s, medical and ICU beds, ventilators, and staff to take care of patients. While hospitals were overwhelmed with the extensive virus outbreak, health care professionals came to the frontlines, fighting the unknown enemy, without any specific treatment.
Every member of the health care industry was directly or indirectly affected by the virus or its consequences, and above all, nurses played a crucial role in this fight. Nurses, comprising more than 50% of the health care and allied professionals, plunged into desperate conditions to care for human lives. What made their role even more paramount was that they spent far more time with patients than any other member of the healthcare team. Even the nurses who were pregnant, breastfeeding, elderly, retired, had co-morbidities or were students put their patients before their own families and health.
Nursing has evolved through wars and pandemics. The Crimean war led Nightingale to shape modern nursing practice. Her environmental theory saved many lives and improved the face of public health. With the ongoing pandemic, all nurses have a bit of Nightingale in them, working under tremendous pressure to address population needs. In the Year of the Nurse and Midwife, nurses raised concerns of public awareness
What set nurses apart from physicians, respiratory therapists, anesthesiologists, and other health care professionals in this time of incredible adversity? While all of these professionals’ focus is on science and empirical knowledge, it is a strong foundation of nursing theories, frameworks, and models that separate nursing from other professions. Knowingly or unknowingly, nurses have implemented nursing theories in their practice during these times of crisis. Whether it is identifying environmental components as outlined by Nightingale or Abdellah’s 21 nursing problems including physical, social, and emotional, or Johnson’s behavioral system model in which constancy is maintained through biological, psychological, and sociological factors or Neuman’s model which emphasizes that a person is a complete system, nurses have not just treated the “illness” but addressed the patient as a “whole”.
When COVID hit our hospital, our administrators outlined policies based on the recommendations of infectious disease specialists, and nurses were asked to limit visits to patients’ rooms to twice per shift to minimize the spread of infection. Nurses could not swallow that; we ended up being in the room 7 to 8 times on an average! Perhaps that contributed to 85% of patients who were successfully discharged from hospitals.
Above all, it was the application of Watson’s 10 carative factors that played a substantial role in the discipline of nursing during these difficult times. Despite the strict visitation policies put in place by hospitals, nurses made sure families were able to connect to their patients via video conferencing. This nursing action cultivated the spirit of love and kindness. They let family members and loved ones know they could contact as many times as possible during the day. Nurses listened to their fears and promoted their expression of feelings. Social media has a plethora of photos and videos of nurses holding patients’ hands, sitting at the bedside of dying patients when no family members could be present. Nurses comforted family members who had psychological stress and negative emotions from not being present with their loved ones during their last moments. Nurses made it possible for my family to wish goodbye to my father-in-law who was 200 miles away from us and passed away after losing his fight against this disease.
By embracing Leininger’s culture care theory, nurses provided care with transcultural understanding, sometimes performing rituals, praying with the patient, while connected with their families on the phone/video, and providing holistic care. During an unrelenting global pandemic, nurses have promoted transformational changes to sustain and preserve human dignity.
About Navninder Kaur
Navninder Kaur is a student in the Online Nursing Education EdD program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a clinical instructor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, CT. She has 10 years of clinical experience in adult medical-surgical nursing.