Nurses Duty in COVID 19 Units - A Great Challenge

Background: COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nurses and in the field of nursing profoundly in direct patient care, nursing practice issues, and healthcare system operations at large. Proper coordinated global response is a need of hour to prepare the health care system including the healthcare professionals. The unique situation also had made wide range of challenges for healthcare providers which in long run had greater impact on their mental health. Therefore, identification of challenges and find pathways to overcome those issues become paramount to maintain the ecosystem in health care. Material & Methods: The study was conducted by using a mix methodology research design. Purposive sampling method was used for selecting samples from targeted population. Out of 100 samples, 80 staff nurses & 20 nurse managers had participated in the study. One data collection tool which consist of demographic profile and 21 items for assessing the challenges of staff nurses was created in Google form to capture the data and 10 open ended questionnaire were created to get deeper understanding of the challenges faced by nurse managers. Data analysis was carried out by descriptive and content analysis. Results: Majority (95%) of participants was female and mean age was 30.71 years. Study had shown that 41.25% participants did not stay with their family members. In staff nurse category, 33.75% had mild (0-25) challenges, 58.75% had moderate (26-50) and 7.5% had severe (51-84) challenges while working in covid unit. Manpower management, Support from institution and issues on PPE & other equipment were the themes emerged from the content analysis. Conclusion: Management of resources in COVID pandemic situation requires good institutional support and dynamic approach in every step of transition and adaptability by frontline workers. Since, nursing force were not convinced initially to work in covid units due to many fear factors, manning and motivating workforce was the greatest challenges for nurse managers to run the covid units smoothly. Providing some form of incentives along with appropriate training, guidance and emotional support helped nurses to continue the deadly needed nursing services for affected patients in COVID units.