Aims To understand how nurses experience providing care for patients hospitalized with COVID‐19 in intensive care units. Background As hospitals adjust staffing patterns to meet the demands of the pandemic, nurses have direct physical contact with ill patients, placing themselves and their families at physical and emotional risk. Methods From June to August 2020, semi‐structured interviews were conducted. Sixteen nurses caring for COVID‐19 patients during the first surge of the pandemic were selected via purposive sampling. Participants worked in ICUs of a quaternary 1,000‐bed hospital in the Northeast United States. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, identifiers were removed, and data were coded thematically. Results Our exploratory study identified four themes that describe the experiences of nurses providing care to patients in COVID‐19 ICUs during the first surge: (a) challenges of working with new co‐workers and teams, (b) challenges of maintaining existing working relationships, (c) role of nursing leadership in providing information and maintaining morale and (d) the importance of institutional‐level acknowledgement of their work. Conclusions As the pandemic continues, hospitals should implement nursing staffing models that maintain and strengthen existing relationships to minimize exhaustion and burnout. Implications for Nursing Management To better support nurses, hospital leaders need to account for their experiences caring for COVID‐19 patients when making staffing decisions.

The COVID‐19 pandemic has placed extraordinary stress on frontline healthcare providers as they encounter significant challenges and risks while caring for patients at the bedside. This study used qualitative research methods to explore nurses and respiratory therapists' experiences providing direct care to COVID‐19 patients during the first surge of the pandemic at a large academic medical center in the Northeastern United States. The purpose of this study was to explore their experiences as related to changes in staffing models and to consider needs for additional support. Twenty semi‐structured interviews were conducted with sixteen nurses and four respiratory therapists via Zoom or by telephone. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, identifiers were removed, and data was coded and analyzed thematically. Five major themes characterize providers' experiences: a fear of the unknown, concerns about infection, perceived professional unpreparedness, isolation and alienation, and inescapable stress and distress. This manuscript analyzes the relationship between these themes and the concept of moral distress and finds that some, but not all, of the challenges that providers faced during this time align with previous definitions of the concept. This points to the possibility of broadening the conceptual parameters of moral distress to account for providers' experiences of treating patients with novel illnesses while encountering institutional and clinical challenges.

Efforts to improve health equity may be advanced by understanding health care providers' perceptions of the causes of health inequalities. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with nurses and registered respiratory therapists (RRTs) who served on intensive care units (ICUs) during the first surge of the pandemic, this paper examines how frontline providers perceive and attribute the unequal impacts of COVID-19. It shows that nurses and RRTs quickly perceived the pandemic's disproportionate burden on Black and Latinx individuals and families. Providers attribute these inequalities to the social determinants of health, and also raise questions about how barriers to healthcare access may have made some patients more vulnerable to the worst consequences of COVID-19. Providers' perceptions of inequality and its consequences on COVID-19 ICUs were emotionally impactful and distressing, suggesting that this is a critical moment for offering clinicians practical strategies for understanding and addressing the persistent structural inequities that cause racial inequalities in health.