BACKGROUND
Nurses are at the forefront of the COVID 19 pandemic. During the pandemic nurses faced an elevated risk of exposure and experienced hazards related to a novel virus. While being heralded as lifesaving heroes on the front lines of the pandemic, nurses experienced more physical, mental and psychosocial problems as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak. Social media discussions by nursing professionals participating in publicly formed Facebook groups is a valuable resource that offers longitudinal insights.
OBJECTIVE
This study aimed to explore how COVID-19 impacted nurses through capturing public sentiments expressed by nurses on social media discussion platforms and how the sentiments changed over time.
METHODS
We collected over 110,993 Facebook discussion posts and comments in an open COVID 19 group for nurses from March 2020 until the end of November 2020. A deidentified offline HTML scraping on social media posts and comments was performed. Using subject-matter expert opinions and social media analytics (topic modeling, information retrieval and sentiment analysis), we performed a human-in-a-loop nursing key perspectives analysis to understand the trends of the COVID-19 impact among at risk nursing communities. We further investigated the key insights of the nursing perspectives trends by reporting the temporal changes of emotional effects, frustration reasoning, impacts of isolation, shortage of safety equipment and the frequency of safety equipment uses. Anonymous quotes were highlighted to add context to the data.
RESULTS
We identified that COVID-19 impacted nurses’ physical, mental and psychosocial health expressed in the form of emotional distress, anger, anxiety, frustration, loneliness and isolation. Major topics discussed were related to work during a pandemic, misinformation from media, improper PPE, PPE side effects, testing positive and loss days of work related to illness.
CONCLUSIONS
Public Facebook nursing groups are venues for nurses to express their experience, opinions and concerns and can offer researchers an important insight to understand the COVID-19 impact on health care workers.