Looking back on how I thought this semester was going to go; this is not how I pictured it. I imagined going to class in person every day, attending clinical to get hands-on experience, and being able to see my classmate’s faces, not just their eyes. COVID-19 has changed many aspects of the world we live in. During this reflection, I will tell you about the personal and professional challenges I have faced during the pandemic; Specifically on what it means to be a nurse from an individual, professional, community, or global perspective. I will remember experiences on the front lines as an EMT, my experiences as a student, and the impacts that it may have on our communities. I will be discussing all of this while relating them to the profession of nursing. I am a current nursing student, and going through this schooling, especially during a pandemic, has had its challenges. However, it has also had some good moments to go along with the challenges that it has brought. The pandemic has changed many things, but some things will never change about an individual’s character.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I have quarantined while also working on the front lines as an EMT. I have done these two different things since the pandemic started; these two other parts consisted of working with many nurses and with many different patients as an EMT. This was contrasted to reflecting on what I saw and heard in the hospital with patients while I quarantined. Before the pandemic began, I knew that nurses were some of the most resilient, hard-working, and adaptable people. Once the pandemic started and things started to change, I confirmed that it was true for myself. I was able to see this, especially with the nurses where I worked. They were terrific people, and even though I was not always with them, I still learned a lot about nursing from observing them. I was also able to see how they had to adapt to the pandemic and change some of the tactics they would typically use with patient contact. They had to use more skills or concepts such as compassion and caring due to global pandemic. When patients were not allowed to have visitors or were only allowed to have one visitor during their stay, the nurse had to fill the support system’s role that the family usually provided. Along with the nurses, the first responders I worked with had to adapt the same way the nurses did. They all had to become resilient and keep doing their job while knowing that they could contract this virus and bring it home to their loved ones.
While the pandemic was happening, life still had to go on. People had to keep going to work, going to school, take care of their family, take care of their house, and all of the normal activities they once did, but with a little twist to it. For most people, the twist was staying home and quarantining to protect themselves and their families from the pandemic. In contrast to this, essential workers, like nurses, still had to go to work and brave the pandemic. They had to be resilient and push through with work so that the world could still function properly.
Nursing students like myself mostly felt these changes. We were no longer able to get the hands-on experience we would get from going to clinical. We had to learn from virtual simulations on the computer, which is nowhere near the same as having real hands-on experience. Virtual clinical consisted of a virtual program that was diagnosed with a condition. We then had to go into the simulation and take care of the patient by pushing commands on the screen, which controlled a virtual nurse. With the pandemic progressing, hospitals are starting to realize how much the nursing students miss out on the experience and let us back into clinical, but only a little bit at a time. However, one positive thing came out of the three days of clinical experience we were able to attend this semester; I met a patient with dementia who had a broken hip. During his visit, he was perplexed as to why no one would stay and talk to him. He didn’t know that the nurses had a minimum of four patients, each with a full floor of patients. When talking with him, I realized all he wanted is during his visit is for someone to sit and talk with him. He just wanted someone to show that they care and that they were there to listen to what he had to say. I learned that the most thing patients want is for someone to listen and show that they care. This positive experience came out of a bad situation, even with all the changing rules and clinical standards. During these, nursing students show resilience by rolling with the punches thrown at them. In some way, I believe that this is getting us prepared for the workforce due to the continually changing learning styles, regulations, clinical learning formats, etc. We are overcoming everything that is happening and learning who we are as students and adults along the way, just like we were before, only in a little different way.
The impact of the pandemic on the professional world leads into how the pandemic has affected our community. Due to the pandemic and many people quarantining for long periods, I can see that there may be a rise in depression and anxiety in some communities. A surge may be due to could be due to individuals isolating like they are supposed to, away from their friends, family, and coworkers that they usually see in a day. A lack of human contact could lead to individuals overthinking the pandemic’s trajectory or even what is going on in their own life. In turn, this may lead to the need for more community mental health resources, opening up leadership opportunities for nurses to educate the public about mental health services in their area. Also, nurses could lead workshops on coping strategies that individuals could use to deal with the new problems they may be facing. These leadership positions would magnify the nurses’ educator role to a bigger scale than what they already do. This is due to nurses already educating their patients about illnesses, diseases, or disorders. They do this in whatever setting they work in to give their patients the best opportunity to recover or comply with the treatment plan. This has not changed, and if anything, if the rates of depression and anxiety do increase, the amount of educating the nurses to do will rise to meet the needs of the patient population.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of the world we live in today. Switching to social distancing, wearing face coverings, online classes, working from home, etc., has been a challenge for many individuals. Some of these individuals chose a profession where they will be on the pandemic’s front line; these individuals are nurses. Before the pandemic, I thought of nursing to be a challenging profession. They are dealing with different patients, educating, comforting, performing tasks, starting IVs, administering medications. Nurses need to be resilient, compassionate, intelligent, and intuitive to complete the job to the best of their ability. Through the current global pandemic, nurses have had to increase the level of these skills. They have had to help patients cope with not being able to have any family members by their side, educate patients through a television screen, and educate the public about the pandemic dangers. They have used the skills they already had and built upon them to make themselves even stronger nurses due to their resilience to get through work every day. Overall, my perspective of a nurse has not changed from what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
