Covid19 and Nursing

Nurses have been on the forefront of the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic from the start and have been hailed the unsung heroes of Covid. Learn how nurses have played a key roll in the battle against Covid. Research papers on Covid-19 and nursing can overview any of the following topics:

• How nurses should handle the undetectable nature of the symptoms of Covid-19.
• How has nursing been affected in the following scenarios: Long-term care facilities, nursing homes, schools, community and government healthcare agencies?
• What part have nurses played in providing health education, screening services and support for individuals who are in a high-risk category?
• What are the key challenges faced by nursing professionals during Covid-19?

The global scale of Covid-19 has allowed nurses to learn a great deal about the spread of the disease. They have played key roles in five different areas concerning the virus:

1. Education, screening and support - Nurses have served to educate the public about strategies for prevention such as not touching the eyes, nose and mouth, along with social distancing and early detection of signs and symptoms of Covid.
2. Screening possible infected individuals - Nurses record case histories, screen and test for infection and implement isolation care along with monitoring patient outcomes.
3. Work in high-risk settings such as nursing homes and long-term care facilities - Nurses are duty-bound to assist those among the highest risk categories such as the elderly and individuals in long-term care facilities. These vulnerable populations count on their expertise to provide a protective and safe environment.
4. Care for individuals with immune deficits and/or underlying diseases - Nurses help protect vulnerable populations such as those with obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic illness, diabetes and cancer.
5. Front-line care for those infected with Covid-19 in acute or critical condition - Nurses provide urgent care to individuals who are infected and symptomatic with Covid.

Nurses and Contact Tracing for Covid

Although attending to the immediate needs of individual patients with Covid must always remain the first priority, nurses must also pay keen and urgent attention to the tasks of capturing and recording data for contact tracing. Consequently, in addition to all of their complex "regular" duties, emergency department nurses must now possess and use current and effective data knowledge, skills, and abilities. Emergency department nurses "often thrive on the unexpected, the challenging, and the unusual incidents they encounter," they are probably "ideally suited" to taking on the added duties involved in managing Covid-19 data. Unfortunately, however, while a fairly extensive literatures exist on the roles of first responders and emergency department personnel on the immediate management of health data, the literature addressing contact tracing of Covid remains quite limited.

Nurses and other personnel also rise to the challenges of developing contingency plans for their facilities to deal with potentially large numbers of Covid patients who might descend upon and overwhelm busy emergency departments during the crises periods surrounding a pandemic. Even when these added volumes of individuals can be managed effectively, a serious potential problem is that they may in fact become exposed to contamination at the facility through their direct and indirect contacts with actual Covid victims. Such contamination might be then spread to others after individuals that leave the facility. Therefore it is essential to ensure that hospital security strictly protects all entry points to prevent unwarranted incursions. Specially trained and qualified nursing personnel would play vital roles in determining who is to be allowed past security during a pandemic crisis situation.

Nurses and Pandemic Preparedness

As complex as they might seem, such facility-level can only be regarded as one small part of nursing preparedness efforts for Covid. Rather, nurses must now participate in broader collaborations with diverse state and federal actors aimed at enabling individual facilities to respond effectively to pandemics. Public health and healthcare systems in the United States were for numerous involved in a rather uncommitted manner in preparations for the possibility of a pandemic prior to the Trump administration. However, the Coronavirus pandemic intensified efforts to develop effective, well-coordinated public health and healthcare emergency responses that would connect diverse local, state, and national entities and empower them to work together in concert based on shared policies, principles, and procedures for responding to a global outbreak.

In fact, Covid-19 contributed to a major paradigm shift in which preparedness efforts for a pandemic have been extended beyond military, police, and emergency medical services to include nurses and other healthcare and public health professionals in increasingly central roles. A major case in point involves the ongoing collaborative efforts between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to develop a National Public Health Strategy for Disease Preparedness and Response that focuses on enhancing the abilities of the nation's public health systems-and the healthcare facilities within those systems-to respond to a pandemic-related public health emergencies, including those involving third world countries.