Aim
To describe the experiences of Italian nurses who have been urgently and compulsorily allocated to a newly established COVID‐19 sub‐intensive care unit.
Background
In the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, no studies have documented the experience of nurses urgently reallocated to a newly created unit.
Method
A qualitative descriptive study. Twenty‐four nurses working in a sub‐intensive care unit created for COVID‐19 patients participated in four focus groups. Audio‐recorded interviews were verbatim‐transcribed; then, a thematic analysis was performed.
Results
The experience of nurses was summarized along three lines: (a) ‘becoming a frontline nurse’, (b) ‘living a double‐faced professional experience’ and (c) ‘advancing in nursing practice’.
Conclusions
Nurses who experienced being mandatorily recruited and urgently reallocated to a COVID‐19 unit lived through a mix of negative feelings in the early stages, a double‐faced situation during the episode and, at the end, the perception of global growth as a person, as a team and as a professional.
Implication for nursing management
Nurse managers could play a key role in identifying and preparing nurses in advance to mitigate their concerns and their sense of unpreparedness. The value attributed to nursing care should be promoted both during and after the current COVID‐19 pandemic.
It is necessary to help and support the placement of these nurses into the Italian workforce with programmes where their practical work is supervised by permanent trained staff, allowing them to develop autonomy and ensuring an optimal standard of nursing care for the patients. It would be necessary to continue these programmes for more than six months.
We had given a questionnaire to a group of newly qualified nurses and nursing managers responsible for their recruitment with the purpose of understanding the factors influencing the choice of the first ward. For this study, 45 nurses and 10 nursing managers had been recruited. There are 19 factors that influence the choice of the first ward: the most important is the kind of patient, both, nursing managers and newly qualified nurses agreed about, while about the other factors there were different answers. Reflecting on the choice factors may help hospitals to better understand the expectations of the newly qualified nurses and start improving projects to make even the less requested wards more attractive; it can also help the faculty to reflect about the academic curriculum that mostly influences the professional future of the students.
Aim:To support the development of appropriate policies and actions in the field of missed nursing care (MNC).Background: There has been an ever-growing international debate on MNC, interventions that nurses have identified as necessary for their patients, but which for various reasons they are unable to provide or are forced to delay. Despite MNC's relevance, its translation into policies and actions has not been documented to date.
Method:A consensus development method was employed involving (a) a nominal group composed of experts in the field, policymakers and the President of the Regional Nursing Professional Boards, and (b) 218 nurses appointed primarily at the managerial levels.Results: A total of eight consensus statements were approved and organized in a series of sub-statements designed to (1) render the concept of MNC culturally acceptable in the Italian context, with the agreement that compromised nursing care (CNC) is the best term to be used in this field, as a synonym for MNC; (2) measure CNC as a strategy to increase patient safety; (3) select an appropriate CNC measurement tool; (4) optimize CNC measurement; (5) conduct effective CNC data analysis; (6) design and implement interventions to prevent and/or minimize CNC; (7) assess and disseminate findings on interventions' effectiveness; and (8) provide final remarks on the way to move forward. Conclusions: We developed a process to introduce the phenomenon of MNC in the Italian culture and agreed firstly on the term compromised nursing care, which better reflects MNC's meaning according to the context and facilitates an open discussion on the phenomenon both within and outside the profession. The following consensus statements emerged represent a systematic approach, starting from the | 1493 PALESE Et AL.
All Moldovan nurses involved in this study, once they arrived in Italy, ceased to exist from an official perspective. Policy and recommendations need to be developed to ensure the integration of Moldovan-educated nurses into the health-care system and to monitor the amount of human capital (in terms of care drain, brain drain and youth drain) that this process risks wasting.
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