Abstract:The Covid-19 pandemic has precipitated the global race for essential personal protective equipment in delivering critical patient care. This has created a dearth of personal protective equipment availability in some countries, which posed particular harm to frontline healthcare workers' health and safety, with undesirable consequences to public health. Substantial discussions have been devoted to the imperative of providing adequate personal protective equipment to frontline healthcare workers. The specific le… Show more
“…And goes on to conclude:‘The state may not be able to salvage the deaths and distress caused to frontline healthcare workers, but it can act more substantively to protect them and to restore public trust that the healthcare system would not collapse in times of pandemic. It has been argued here that hospitals ought to maintain their obligations to provide PPE to healthcare workers, because a failure to adequately protect them is also a failure to protect public health’ p. 202 (Chan, 2021).…”
Aims
To use nurses' descriptions of what would have improved their working lives during the first peak of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the UK.
Design
Analysis of free‐text responses from a cross‐sectional survey of the UK nursing and midwifery workforce.
Methods
Between 2 and 14 April 2020, 3299 nurses and midwives completed an online survey, as part of the ‘Impact of COVID‐19 on Nurses’ (ICON) study. 2205 (67%) gave answers to a question asking for the top three things that the government or their employer could do to improve their working lives. Each participants' response was coded using thematic and content analysis. Multiple response analysis quantified the frequency of different issues and themes and examined variation by employer.
Results
Most (77%) were employed by the National Health Service (77%) and worked at staff or senior staff nurse levels (55%). 5938 codable responses were generated. Personal protective equipment/staff safety (60.0%), support to workforce (28.6%) and better communication (21.9%) were the most cited themes. Within ‘personal protective equipment’, responses focussed most on available supply. Only 2.8% stated that nothing further could be done. Patterns were similar in both NHS and non‐NHS settings.
Conclusions
The analysis provided valuable insight into key changes required to improve the work lives of nurses during a pandemic. Urgent improvements in provision and quality of personal protective equipment were needed for the safety of both workforce and patients.
Impact
Failure to meet nurses needs to be safe at work appears to have damaged morale in this vital workforce. We identified key strategies that, if implemented by the Government and employers, could have improved the working lives of the nursing and midwifery workforce during the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic and could prevent the pandemic from having a longer‐term negative impact on the retention of this vital workforce.
Patient or Public Contribution
No Patient or Public Contribution, due to the COVID‐19 Pandemic, urgency of the work and the target population being health and social care staff.
“…And goes on to conclude:‘The state may not be able to salvage the deaths and distress caused to frontline healthcare workers, but it can act more substantively to protect them and to restore public trust that the healthcare system would not collapse in times of pandemic. It has been argued here that hospitals ought to maintain their obligations to provide PPE to healthcare workers, because a failure to adequately protect them is also a failure to protect public health’ p. 202 (Chan, 2021).…”
Aims
To use nurses' descriptions of what would have improved their working lives during the first peak of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the UK.
Design
Analysis of free‐text responses from a cross‐sectional survey of the UK nursing and midwifery workforce.
Methods
Between 2 and 14 April 2020, 3299 nurses and midwives completed an online survey, as part of the ‘Impact of COVID‐19 on Nurses’ (ICON) study. 2205 (67%) gave answers to a question asking for the top three things that the government or their employer could do to improve their working lives. Each participants' response was coded using thematic and content analysis. Multiple response analysis quantified the frequency of different issues and themes and examined variation by employer.
Results
Most (77%) were employed by the National Health Service (77%) and worked at staff or senior staff nurse levels (55%). 5938 codable responses were generated. Personal protective equipment/staff safety (60.0%), support to workforce (28.6%) and better communication (21.9%) were the most cited themes. Within ‘personal protective equipment’, responses focussed most on available supply. Only 2.8% stated that nothing further could be done. Patterns were similar in both NHS and non‐NHS settings.
Conclusions
The analysis provided valuable insight into key changes required to improve the work lives of nurses during a pandemic. Urgent improvements in provision and quality of personal protective equipment were needed for the safety of both workforce and patients.
Impact
Failure to meet nurses needs to be safe at work appears to have damaged morale in this vital workforce. We identified key strategies that, if implemented by the Government and employers, could have improved the working lives of the nursing and midwifery workforce during the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic and could prevent the pandemic from having a longer‐term negative impact on the retention of this vital workforce.
Patient or Public Contribution
No Patient or Public Contribution, due to the COVID‐19 Pandemic, urgency of the work and the target population being health and social care staff.
“…Healthcare staff, including pharmacists, have a reported increased risk of positive COVID-19 testing [ 15 ]. This sheds light for several studies to discuss the obligations to provide necessary protective equipment for healthcare workers in order to fight emerging diseases [ 16 ]. The majority of pharmacists in our study were committed to protective measures for COVID-19, including: social distancing, wearing masks, and wearing gloves.…”
Objectives: To analyze the role of pharmacists during the COVID-19 pandemic, to measure pharmacists’ attitude toward COVID-19 safety measures (wearing masks, wearing gloves, isolation shield, good hygiene, etc.), and explore their perspectives regarding a second wave of the virus. Methods: This cross-sectional online survey study was conducted in Jordan during the COVID-19 outbreak in July 2020 to discuss Jordanian pharmacists’ awareness of safety at their workplace during the COVID-19 outbreak, their sources of information, and their predictions for COVID-19 vaccination. Results: The participants (n = 311) were all pharmacists mostly aged between 23–30 years old (45%) and female (83%). The primary source of information about COVID-19 was social networking (38.9%). Pharmacists were committed to social distancing (86.5%) and wearing masks (76.2%). They expressed levels of agreement to their role in decreasing COVID-19 spread (94.2%) and correcting false information (94.5%); they expressed levels of expectation toward concern about a second COVID-19 wave (83%) that would be more severe than the previous one (43.4%). Pharmacists expected that an influenza vaccine might be helpful in decreasing severity and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic (56.9%). Pharmacists expected COVID-19 vaccine development within 6 months of administering our study survey (84.9%) and that vaccination might be effective in preventing COVID-19 (93%) infection. Conclusion: Pharmacists expressed positive roles on COVID-19 spread through exemplary actions, self-commitment to protection measures, and public health awareness. Social media as a source of health information should be cautiously investigated, and pharmacists should always refer to evidence-based sources. The role of pharmacists is particularly important for the upcoming era of COVID-19 vaccination administration and awareness.
“…It became clear, however, why they were slow to recommend mask-wearing: In early February, health authorities were learning that a global shortage of masks was imminent, even though at that same time, global facecloth manufacturing had risen by over 40% (WHO, 2020c). Taking cues from China’s sudden mask shortage and price inflation, the WHO predicted that the entire medical system could collapse should frontline workers not be properly protected (Chan, 2020). Given the urgent global need for masks, the WHO therefore decided that recommending mask-wearing for the general public was not worth the risk of this shortage (WHO, 2020d).…”
Section: The Ritualization Of Ambivalencementioning
How do we evaluate the value of a medical mask? And how does the mask acquire its meanings? In this paper, I approach the mask as a media entity: a mediated and mediating thing whose meanings and values arise from within a complex network of relations. The recent political divide regarding mask-wearing has roots in the ambivalence and confusion about their efficacy in the first few months of the pandemic. It remained unclear for some time whether masks protected the wearer or those around them, but nonetheless a global mask-making cottage industry emerged, shaped by DIY and citizen science. The DIY community cleverly leveraged this core ambivalence, foregrounding multivalence, and thereby feeding into a binary ethical obligation: for whom does one wear a mask? The mask was thus baptized into regular usage by the ‘I/You’ utterance that we are now familiar with: ‘I wear my mask to protect you, as you wear your mask to protect me’. This paper reframes the facemask as a complex media entity, one that absorbs its presuppositions, while also being placed into new arrangements by its arrival through an emerging relational network.
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