The Impact of Coronavirus on Staff Nurses’ Feeling While Giving Direct Care to COVID-19 Patients in Various COVID Facilities

Abstract

Background: Nurses are very important frontline health care professionals as they spend more time with patients than other professionals. This is even more so at this critical time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The nursing profession is facing great challenges in coping with the pandemic as they are more vulnerable to exposure and infection with the disease. Kuwait is not spared from the global pandemic which has put the health sector under immense pressure. Because COVID-19 is highly transmissible and deadly, it poses a huge health risk to nurses and has a huge impact on their cognitive, emotional, behavioural and physical dimensions. Aim: The study aims to explore the positive and negative emotions and feelings of staff nurses while giving care to COVID-19 patients. Materials and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out. 300 nurses from different general hospitals, field hospitals, and quarantine facilities in Kuwait participated in the study. A questionnaire was used to collect the data. Results: The findings show that for the cognitive evaluation, 72% were moderately affected, for the emotional evaluation 51.3% and 44% were moderately and mildly affected respectively, for the behavioural evaluation, 66.7% were severely affected, and for the physical evaluation, 43.3% and 31.7% were moderately and severely affected respectively. Prolonged working hours has a highly significant negative correlation to emotional (r −0.165), behavioral (r −0.177) and physical (r −0.155) dimension of the nurses at 0.01 level using Spearman's correlation. Conclusion: The study concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the psychophysical dimensions of staff nurses.

COVID-19 Fear Level of Surgical Nurses Working in Pandemic and Surgical Units

“…Similarly, studies in the literature states that there is a relation between the fear level of COVID-19 of the civil population and their age; that older adult population has higher fear than youngers. 52 , 53 , 54 In their cross-sectional and descriptive study, Taghaddom et al 55 from Kuwait investigated the impact of the pandemic on nurses working in COVID-19 units and reported that although nurses’ psychological responses were better with their age and duration of nursing experiences, some of them were crying at work and experiencing fear. According to the results, it is understandable that older nurses are more fearful when caring for COVID-19 patients, given that COVID-19 infection mortality rises with patient age.…”

Trials Faced by Staff Nurses Caring for COVID-19 Patients

“…Another study showed that prolonged working hours has a negative correlation to emotional (r-0.165), behavioural (r-0.177), and physical (r-0.155) dimension of the nurses at 0.01 level using Spearman's correlation. Yet, one more previous study demonstrated that mean depression, anxiety, and stress scale score was 33.4 (Taghaddom et al, 2020). The mean post-traumatic stress disorder scale was 29.3.…”