Lived Experiences of Nursing Professionals Providing Care to COVID-19 Patients

Objective: To analyze nursing professionals’ reports on their lived experience in the care provided to hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Materials and Methods: This is an exploratory study using a qualitative analysis, which included twelve nurses and eight nursing technicians from a public hospital in Brazil, conducted between December 2020 and February 2021. The inclusion criteria were professionals who provided care to COVID-19 patients in emergency, intensive care, and inpatient units and who had at least one year of experience in the institution. The interviews were analyzed through content and similarity analysis that generated a similarity tree; the Reinert method was used for thematic categories. Results: Most participants were female, with a mean age of 34.15 years and 4.85 years of experience. From the analysis, the words ‘patient,’ ‘to stay,’ and ‘to find’ were the most frequent, and for the categories, they were “nursing professionals’ feelings regarding the pandemic,” “the nurses’ role and work with the multi-professional team in the care provided to patients with COVID-19,” “precautions with the care provided to patients with COVID-19,” and “nursing professionals’ concern that their family members may become ill during the pandemic.” Conclusions: The nursing staff is predominantly composed of females and, in their reports on the lived experience of providing care to patients with COVID-19, they pointed out that concern and fear were prevalent, with the family being one of the protective factors to withstand the risks of working against something novel that may result in death.