Artikel
Working as a nurse in a long-term care facility during the COVID-19 pandemic: experiences and lessons learned
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Autoren
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Johanna Rutten
- CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, Health Services Research
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Ramona Backhaus
- CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, Health Services Research
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Jan Hamers
- CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, Health Services Research
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Hilde Verbeek
- CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, Health Services Research
| Veröffentlicht: | 25. September 2020 |
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Gliederung
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Background and current state of (inter)national research: Nursing home residents have a high risk of getting severe COVID-19 and show an increased related mortality. The pandemic is ongoing and has led to enormous consequences for nursing homes worldwide. To reduce the number of COVID-19 infections, Dutch nursing homes have taken very restrictive measures that impact their way of living and working. These measures include bans on visitors and volunteers, isolation of residents, reduced contact times between residents and direct care staff, and limited medical and allied health professionals’ visits. As direct care staff had little time to prepare for the pandemic and had to adapt to changes in their way of working quickly, the mental and physical impact on staff is expected to be huge.
Research questions and objectives: Gain insight into how staff members experienced work during the pandemic, how their way of working changed, what they think is necessary for their sustainable employment, and which changes of work they would like to keep in the future.
Methods or hypothesis: A qualitative, study consisting of semi-structured, face-to-face focus groups was conducted. Participants (n=27) were care staff from 4 different teams of a Dutch long-term care organization. The teams were selected for participation based on the amount of COVID-19 infections amongst residents. In 2 wards, no residents were infected, while in the other 2 wards many residents got infected or died. By means of photo elicitation, participants reported their experiences by selecting a photo that best matched their experiences during the lock-down. Data was analyzed with theme-based content analysis
Results: The first preliminary results show four major themes emerging from the data. First, participants from wards with COVID-19 infections experienced high work pressure, caused by ambiguous communication and additional tasks. Participants from the other wards reported less work pressure than usual due to less mandatory tasks. Second, all participants felt an interference between work and private life caused by fear of infection amongst others. Third, participants reported a lack of social support from leaders in the crisis situation, but a higher support from other team members. And last, they expressed their concerns regarding the applied measures, especially in terms of increased loneliness for residents.
Discussion: This is the first study to investigate the experiences of care staff in Dutch nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings point out that there are lessons learned which can also be applied outside a crisis situation to improve working in nursing homes.
Practical implications: Based on the results of our study it is recommended that nursing home managers actively provide social support to their staff and create evaluation moments. It is important to offer relationship centered care, also in crisis situations and search for opportunities to create new ways of working.
