Impact of Covid 19 on Nurses and Healthcare Systems in Florida

‘Around the world in 80 days’ is what comes to mind as I start this journey to the end of my degree. In approximately 80 days, I will be done with my degree and well on my way to a new level in my career. This has been an exciting and yet challenging time for me. The scariest part was the pandemic that seemed to be a threat to my educational pursuits. However, as it turned out, the pandemic created new ways of studying and also gave me a greater determination to pursue my degree.

This week I also met with my mentor. My mentor is a role model that I admire and would one day aspire to become. He has been a nurse for the last 36 years. He knows his way around the field, and at my workplace, he has demonstrated, time and again, that nursing is not all about theory but finding what works effectively and efficiently. I gave him my pre-conference form to sign, and after going through it and pointing out a few areas that needed clarification, he went ahead and signed it.

I wanted to make sure that my Individual Success Plan was feasible and realistic, and so, before giving it to my mentor, I had to go through it and even asked my close friend to have a look at it. I did not want to set unrealistic targets, neither did I want to short change myself. I then presented the ISP to my mentor, who guided me on the most suitable and timely topic. He believed that the topic area I chose would need to be relevant to today’s patient and should also make a case for future research in the same.

This week, the discussion was on evidence-based practice. The IoM stated that 90% of the practice in healthcare settings should be evidence-based by the year 2020. The US has not achieved this goal as it is only at 15%. The COVID-19 pandemic also disrupted any progress that may have been made. As healthcare facilities were faced with unprecedented challenges, new ways of caring for patients needed to be formulated. In this light, my mentor and I decided that a topic focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on nursing staff would make for an ideal capstone topic. Reducing the impact of the pandemic on healthcare staff is an aspect of care that will need to be explored and, based on the evidence gathered, recommended for implementation in different healthcare settings.

Week 2

This has been an insightful week. Healthcare delivery encapsulates not only the direct, compassionate care that nurses accord patients but also the systems they use in caring for patients. In caring for patients, nurses become affected as well, and this can have negative outcomes if not attended to. When one area or department is negatively impacted in its service delivery, it affects the entire healthcare facility. My preceptor and I discussed how an organization is like a human body, when one part of the human body is in pain, the entire body will experience discomfort until such a time when the pain is alleviated.

With this perception, we agreed that I would take a ‘tour’ of the healthcare facility and observe how the high influx of patients during the COVID-19 peak into the care facility affected other departments not directly caring for the said patients. Initially, it appeared that nurses at the ER and those at the ICU/HDU were the only ones affected by the high number of patients coming in. However, as I visited other departments, I came to understand that other departments were affected as well. For example, the orthopedic department had to give up their stockpile of PPEs and oxygen to the ER and ICU/HDU. This negatively affected service delivery in the department during the Black Lives Matter protests when more people were admitted to the orthopedic ward after getting injured in the melee.

Other than the shortage of equipment, nurses were becoming mentally and physically exhausted from caring for so many infected patients. The high mortality rates and even losing colleagues to the coronavirus was taking a toll on the nurses. Something needed to be done to reduce the infection rates-the hospital-acquired infection rates. This week, I selected the topic I wanted to research in my Capstone project.

Week 3

This week we talked about healthcare delivery that was patient-centred and from a cultural dimension. My preceptor and I discussed the different times we have had to deal with patients who came from ethnic minorities and whose care had seemed challenging. I remember at one time when an Iranian woman came to the healthcare facility with a 7-year-old boy, and no one understood whatever she was saying. What seemed odd was that the boy expected us to converse with him directly and not his mother. Any questions we needed to ask were to be directed to him. Although he understood some level of English, the staff still had a hard time understanding what the two were attempting to communicate. At th