Covid-19 has significantly influenced healthcare and has consequently impacted the response of nurses in palliative care to the needs of their patients. As a nurse who works in such an environment, although each particular day is different from another, it is undisputed that changing work conditions have resulted in a high level of burn out due to stresses related to social distancing.
With movement restrictions and increased need for social distancing to prevent the spread of covid-19, in a particular day, a nurse efforts to visit individual patients is highly impeded. They would wake up in the morning and rather than drive to visit their patients and assess their situation while providing support such as management of symptoms; they would sit and start interacting with the first patient virtually. Although telehealth would make it possible for interaction between the nurse and the patient, the nurse strategy of better understanding patients’ needs, for example, by playing cards with them or taking a walk is impeded. One of the biggest challenges for the nurse in this situation is before they virtually interact with all patients, another patient’s condition could quickly deteriorate, needing urgent help of the nurse, especially because in some cases such patients would also not allowed to interact with family members ( Etkind et al., 2020).
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Before the end of the day, the nurse should have attended 4 to 6 patients, all whose concerns might have been escalated social interaction restrictions. With the need to provide even more care under such restriction, stress emanates from the need for the nurse to comprehensively serve the patients even when the environment is not conducive ( Alharbi et al., 2020). Sometimes, the inability to use telehealth on a particular day to reach some patients heightens the stress levels. On a given day, it is not definite that the nurse will effectively serve his or her patients while working remotely, hence, the high level of stress.
References
Alharbi, J., Jackson, D., & Usher, K. (2020). The potential for COVID‐19 to contribute to compassion fatigue in critical care nurses. Journal of Clinical Nursing .
Etkind, S. N., Bone, A. E., Lovell, N., Cripps, R. L., Harding, R., Higginson, I. J., & Sleeman, K. E. (2020). The role and response of palliative care and hospice services in epidemics and pandemics: a rapid review to inform practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management .
