How a pandemic changed Nursing care at the Hospital | Hospital Nursing (2022)
How a pandemic changed Nursing care at the Hospital | Hospital Nursing (2022). In this video I will talk about the various things that I have noticed changed on units and hospitals due to the pandemic. I thought it would be interesting to hear what my hospital did and I am curious to know how other hospitals have changed too.
The first and most obvious change was wearing a mask for 12 hours. This was actually more difficult than I had thought. Wearing a mask for this long was so incredibly uncomfortable but even more in the emergency department because you are often running around so much. Especially for me as I often had facial hair which was another thing that I had personally change. Due to the risk of virus transmission I had to shave all my facial hair often which was bigger problem than you would think. My beard grows incredibly fast and when I was wearing a mask my hair would get caught on the mask and it would lead to these mask fibers being all around my face.
Another change that was interesting to see was the flow of patients throughout the hospital. During the initial months there was massive changes because the patients needed to be safely placed on floors which did not expose them to patients who might have covid. As a result everyone that had any sort of respiratory symptom in emergency had to be swabbed and was either kept in emergency or was placed on a floor for patients who are waiting for covid results. This meant that patients that had covid must be placed on a specific and separate floor and the ones that were not covid positive must be placed on a different floor. This was a pretty massive change as they had to basically remove and adjust certain floors of the entire hospital.
Another massive change was the fact that hospital protocols needed to be created to accommodate for the unknown. For example protocols needed to be in place for pregnant women in labor who were covid +. People who enter emergency who were covid + needed to have a safe and effective way of limiting risk of transmission. And also people who were very ill from the virus needed to have a separate team to provide safe and effective care. This was all huge changes that needed to take place in a span of a few days to accommodate for a pandemic. It also meant that there were some floors that needed to have construction done very rapidly to accommodate for this change.
The other change that made working challenging was that staff rooms needed to be changed to adhere to social distancing guidelines. Staff rooms are typically quite small, this meant that we often did not get a chance to eat food in our staff room during common break times such as lunch or dinner. As a result many of us had to take breaks in common areas but so did many other nurses on other floors which resulted in limited space to have lunch or dinner. This may seem like a minor detail but when you work for 12 hours and want to have a place to just sit, relax and eat lunch this can get quite annoying really quickly.
Surgeries were rescheduled. This was probably the most devastating for the general public. Many patients that required to have surgeries for their chronic pain problems were no longer able to get it when they were scheduled. This meant that so many people were delayed and as a result had to live with a decreased quality of life.
Overall, I do not believe that this was the fault of anyone. The pandemic requires such rapid change in places and it was a learning experience for everyone and the world. However being on the front lines of this pandemic I saw so many sad things occur and I wanted to speak to the many changes I noticed. I would love to hear how your hospital changes and if there was anything I missed that you would like to share. Let me know in the comments. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video.
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