Feelings and Motivation of COVID Ward Nurses: Psychological Impact of COVID 19

The COVID 19 pandemic had a significant impact on the nurses working closely among patients with COVID 19. This study aimed at determining the psychological impact (staff feeling, motivating factors) of COVID 19 pandemic among nursing personnel involved in caring patients with COVID 19. Participants who had experience of taking care of COVID 19 patients for minimum of one week completed self-administered tool to determine feelings of nursing staff and motivating factors that would motivate the nursing staff to continue to care the patients in this pandemic and to involve themselves as care provider in the possible future outbreak. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to interpret the results.Three fourth of staff (76 %) had expressed that they feel professionally obligated to continue taking care of patients with COVID 19. More than half (55%) of the staff had felt nervous and scared to work in COVID areas and 47% of staff had expressed fear of spending more time with patients with COVID. Availability of medical benefits (98.81%), adequate PPE (97.62%), counseling services (97.62%) includingvaccine (91.67%) and consideration in the duty schedule (98.81%) wereagreed to be major motivating factors by the staff. All the staff were happy about provision of refreshment in their respective clinical areas.These are the considerations that must be made in order to inspire and motivate nursing staff to work in the possibility of a pandemic in the future. There was no evidence of an association between demographic factors and psychological impact.