Covid 19 response to peer paper.
COVID-19 & Personal Beliefs/Values
Herno Sejour
St. Thomas University
NUR 415: Health Care Issues
Dr. Kathleen Price
April 1, 2021
COVID-19 & Personal Beliefs/Values
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented significant challenges in health care and continues to do so as it continues to spread. It is an unprecedented time that most nurses including myself have never experienced. The pandemic has shaken the core of most things that I believed in as a nurse and has created significant doubts, frustrations, and ethical dilemmas. Respiratory infections such as the COVID-19 spread through droplets and interpersonal contact. As frontline care workers, the nurses are exposed to the virus as they attend to the patients (Fernandez et al., 2020). Nurses are the first line of defense as they triage suspected cases of the infection and may contract the virus when attending to patients. The reality is potential exposure to a novel virulent pandemic with no cure has especially become real during the period. The impact of the same is fear and anxiety that one might get infected and spread the virus to loved ones. The lack of enough resources such as PPEs further increases the fear and anxiety that one has and it has been among the key causes of losing faith in the health care administrative system. As a nurse, I believed that nothing would shake my core beliefs and nothing would want to make me leave the profession as I am passionate about nursing. However, the pandemic and the fear that I might lose my loved ones because I have exposed them to a deadly virus changed the reality of things for me as I contemplated staying at home during the period when the health care system was in chaos to protect those that I love.
Nurses are expected to uphold key ethical values and ensure that their primary concern is their patients. However, the nursing code of ethics also requires that nurses engage in self-care and, therefore, nurses have to find a balance when caring for themselves and when promoting safety standards (Hossain & Clatty, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has created grave ethical tensions and dilemmas in the provision of care. Nurses have been put in tough situations where they have had to make critical decisions. Seeing nurses in nations such as Spain decide who to give the ICU bed to and who to let die was a significant stressor. It shook down the ethical beliefs and values that I had as a nurse. Nurses have been forced to follow public health protocols some of which go against the patient-centered ethical protocols of the nursing profession. Having to choose who to provide care to means that nurses are unable to provide care to all equally and this is a key moral stressor.
Moving forward, I am hoping that this is the only pandemic that I will ever encounter and I am also hopeful that the world and the health care system will be better prepared for any future pandemics by taking key lessons from this one. The moral injury and psychological impact of the pandemic will have a lingering effect for a while. As for now, building resilience and learning how to cope will go a long way as there is no telling whether there will be a fourth wave that will be more severe. One of the best approaches that I am practicing now is to increase self-awareness and try to learn as much as possible about the virus through the already published research materials. Being flexible to protocol changes is also important as it will help the system adjust and meet the changing needs of patients.