Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has provoked several changes in home care. Understanding home care nurses' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic plays an essential role in home care management.Objective: This study aimed to explore and articulate the experience of home care nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain.Design: A qualitative study using hermeneutic phenomenology was carried out. Twenty home care nurses were interviewed by teleconference between January and March 2021. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using qualitative data analysis software.Results: Three main themes with five subthemes emerged from the data analysis: (a) "The effect of COVID-19 pandemic on home care," with the subtheme "the reorganization of home care nurses' competencies"; (b) "The role of telehealth in home care," which included the subthemes "home care nurses' satisfaction with telehealth" and "barriers to implement telehealth in home care"; and (c) "Effects of the pandemic on home care nurses' lives," including the subthemes "working in a pandemic is emotionally draining" and "the continuing fear of infecting others."Discussion: The findings from this study demonstrate the profound effect that home care has experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Home care nurses' competencies were modified to care for and diagnose COVID-19 patients. Face-to-face home care was replaced by telehealth. All home care nurses experienced physical and psychological symptoms and the fear of infecting others.
Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author's name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pagination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.