I had the most interesting experience working as a nursing professional during pandemic. It was an eye-opening experience with mixed feelings. It was scary and rewarding at the same time. Working in ER on a casual basis, I decided to pick up more shifts than usual as the schools had cancelled classes and I was working less as a nursing instructor. Being a father of two young children and with lack of information on this virus, I was hesitant at first but wanted to do my part with my colleagues and be there with them during that time. It was reassuring to see friends and families sending kind messages. Every evening, we would go out by the main entrance to see our local police parading and honking to acknowledge front line health professionals. We were considered heroes; neighbours would bang on pots and pans in the evening to show their support.  It was a proud moment for me personally when one of my colleagues sent a picture of me to the local news channel and I was recognized as a health care hero. 

Once there was more information available on COVID and as people continued with their lives, we started seeing more patients coming into the hospital. This coincided with the increased spread of COVID. The number of patients entering the ER was increasing every single day and I saw most of my colleagues leaving their emergency department jobs for either teaching, home health, ICU, or other units where the workload was not as extensive as the ERs. There were constant changes in practice particularly with the PPE shortage, higher acuity, and staff getting sick. Most of the times I felt anxious, not prepared, and unsafe to provide care to my clients. As described in Bartzik et al (2021), nurses in other countries, including Germany, were not satisfied with their well-being due to the fear of contracting the virus. I believe that the fear of contracting the virus and the workload were the two main reasons for the decline in nurses leaving frontlines or the nursing profession. Also, as a nursing instructor I am seeing a decline in new applicants for the nursing program, and I am questioning whether the fear of similar pandemics in the future and workload are the contributing factors.

Bartzik, M., Aust, F., & Peifer, C. (2021). Negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on nurses can be buffered by a sense of humor and appreciation. BMC Nursing, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-021-00770-5 

This video goes over what epistemology is and the three basic questions in Epistemology:  

First question is, what is knowledge? Speaker talks about the belief being a central piece of knowledge and makes a great point that simply believing does not mean we possess the knowledge of that belief. Belief must be true if we have knowledge and to claim we have knowledge, justification is needed for our belief to show it is true. While listening to this, I reflected upon a great debate I had with one of my close friends about the use of ivermectin on covid positive patients. We both lacked knowledge and my argument was that it was unsafe to give Ivermectin to covid positive patients without a proper trial on humans while my friend believed it was safe as it was taken by many people he knew, who recovered quickly from covid without any adverse effects.  

Second question is can we have knowledge? Or can we achieve a true justified belief? Speaker talks about dogmatism and skepticism when it comes to justified beliefs as possessing knowledge. 

Lastly, if knowledge is possible, how do we get it? Speaker talks about dogmatism, which believes knowledge can only be achieved by applying reasons to the ideas in our mind. Also, speaker talks about rationalism and empiricism. In rationalism, the belief is there are some ideas that are not acquired, we already have basic set of ideas in our mind from birth. On the other hand, beliefs we acquire through experience will need to be justified to reach a level of knowledge. Empiricism believes almost all ideas are acquired through experience. 

YouTube. (2021, March 12). Overview of epistemology (part 1). YouTube. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhwIm39BSos

To be able to provide the best care possible, it is crucial to have all resources in place for nurses or other healthcare professionals. It is difficult when the nurses cannot provide the care that we are capable of in terms of the skill set due to scarcity of resources. This was evident during the early stages of the pandemic where nurses could not provide the care within the nursing standards leading to burnouts and staff shortage. Working in ER and going through the pandemic, I felt that we were on the verge of going away from professional standards and unit policies due to lack of resources such as, personal protective equipment, staff shortages, increase in ER visits. Clients also expressed frustration on wait times, standard of care and overall satisfaction.

Working in virtual health in British Columbia, one common area of concern for most clients is the inability to connect with a family doctor on time or long wait times for speciality consultations. Clients are not able to find a family doctor due to a significant rise in population through immigration with same number of physicians, nurses, and hospitals. There seems to be a distrust between patients and the health authorities. This can further impact the relationship between clients, healthcare workers, and the local/federal authorities.

Lack of resource available to nurses can also have a negative impact on a nurse’s physical and mental health. A lot of nurses and other healthcare workers at times have to attend counselling sessions and other mindfulness activities due to the burnouts. This in turn, can have a negative effect on the nurse-client relationship.

Vryonides, S., Papastavrou, E., Charalambous, A., Andreou, P., & Merkouris, A. (2015). The ethical dimension of nursing care rationing: A thematic synthesis of qualitative studies. Nursing ethics, 22(8), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733014551377

Li, K., Frumkin, A., Bi, W. G., Magrill, J., & Newton, C. (2023). Biopsy of Canada's family physician shortage. Family medicine and community health, 11(2), e002236. https://doi.org/10.1136/fmch-2023-002236

I watched this video in nursing school, and I remember getting emotional as I had a family member who was struggling with their health. This video along with my personal experience changed my view going into nursing profession and made me realize the importance of expressing empathy and to feel how patient’s feel as mentioned in this video. This video made me realize how important it is to understand what the patients are going through as they are already in a vulnerable position. This is when the nursing theory such as Peplau’s nursing theory is very helpful in interpersonal communication to gain their trust and involve them in decision-making. Empathy and compassion can have a significant impact on a patient’s health and recovery. One change that I have made in my nursing practice is to always validate my patient’s concerns or emotions by reassuring them that what they feel is normal and understandable. I teach my students to use this strategy to develop a trusting relationship with their patients.

Sadly, we still see a lot of situations where patients have negative experience because of challenges in providing empathic care (Karvelytė et al., 2021). It was interesting to find an article that goes over creating this experience of ill-health as a powerful tool to develop empathy towards patients. Stimulation techniques have shown to be very helpful in creating illness experiences by playing a scenario for a particular disease (Karvelytė et al., 2021). This helped the healthcare workers to gain a deeper insight of their patient’s illness and the expected outcome was to improve their future empathic care towards patients. I think that this is something that I will be able to take to the educational institute that I work at and advocate for more use of simulation to help create these experiences where learners can see through patient’s perspective.

Decety, J. (2020). Empathy in medicine: What it is, and how much we really need it. The American  Journal of Medicine, 133(5), 561–566. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2019.12.012

Karvelytė, M., Rogers, J., & Gormley, G. J. (2021). ‘walking in the shoes of our patients’: A scoping review of healthcare professionals learning from the simulation of patient illness experiences. Advances in Simulation, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41077-021-00194-w