Lack of Nurses during COVID-19 Pandemic

Lack of Nurses during COVID-19 Pandemic
Nurses are very important when it comes to taking care of people with different health care needs. Most of a nurse’s time is spent taking care of patients. The problem of a lack of nurses has different effects on the health care systems of the United States and other countries (Al Thobaity and Alshammari, 2020). When there aren’t enough nurses, they have to care for more patients than planned, which makes the care they give less safe and of lower quality. When not managed and treated at the right time, the ratio of nurses to patients goes up, which makes nurses more tired, burnt out, unhappy at work, and likely to leave their jobs. The patients’ health is also affected because they get care that isn’t good enough, isn’t safe, or isn’t of high enough quality. This affects the patients’ experience and happiness even more. The covid-19 outbreak spread all over the world and killed a lot of people and made a lot of other people very sick. Al Thobaity and Alshammari claimed in 2020 that the pandemic put a strain on the health care system because health care workers were also infected. Since there were not many nurses before the Covid pandemic, patients were the ones who suffered the most. The shortage of nurses was made worse by the lack of other health tools, which caused more patients to die.Because of fear of the disease and the need to follow the World Health Organization’s rules on how to avoid getting Covid-19, a lot of people didn’t go to the hospital for health care because of the Covid-19 outbreak. Telehealth was a great way to help people get health care from the comfort of their own homes. But the nursing shortage was still felt because there were still fewer nurses than planned to care for patients who were very sick and had severe symptoms of Covid-19. In order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, other countries had to get help from health workers, like nurses from other countries. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the lack of nurses in nursing homes was made worse by the fact that it was hard to get personal safety equipment. Without the right number of nurses for each patient, the nursing homes had trouble keeping up with infection control measures, even when there was a chance of getting fined more. As a result, more nurses were sent home to be isolated, and the Covid-19 virus spread to the nurses, other health care workers, and people who were in the hospital for medical care. The nurses were not immune to the covid-19 virus, so they also got sick from it. Several nurses and other health workers died from the disease.Al Thobaity and Alshammari (2020) say that it can be hard for people to recover from the effects of covid-19 disease because there aren’t enough nurses to give regular care to patients and because patients are asking for more health care services. Different countries’ governments have to think of ways to make sure they hire more nurses than they need each year. This is hard to do because no one saw a covid-19 epidemic coming. The pandemic also hurt the economies of a number of countries. This makes the government think twice before deciding whether to add more nurses to the health care system or more resources to fight against covid-19, like personal protective equipment and giving the vaccine to more people.
References

Al Thobaity, A., & Alshammari, F. (2020). Nurses on the frontline against the COVID-19 pandemic: an Integrative review. Dubai Medical Journal, 3(3), 87-92. https://doi.org/10.1159/000509361

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