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It is profoundly ironic that in the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife 2020, nurses are pivotal healthcare providers in the "war against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. Registered nurses (RNs) around the world are at the forefront in providing care, support, and education for patients with SARS-CoV-2 and their significant others. A case study approach to examine published and media information was used to answer the question: "Is it possible that the extraordinary demands, challenges, and unexpected consequences experienced by RNs practicing during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will have a disastrous impact on nurses, nursing, and the future of health care in the United States and globally?"
The World Health
Organization (WHO) declared 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife in honor of the 200th birthday of Florence Nightingale (Phillips & Catrambone, 2020). Modern nursing as we know it started with efforts of Nightingale to train nurses in the mid-19th century to care for victims in the Crimean War. "Nursing's contributions to improving the public's health during the time of crisis dates to the days of Nightingale" (Phillips & Catrambone, 2020, para. 4). Today, nurses are "serving as front line providers during some of the world's most recent infectious disease outbreaks including H1N1 Swine Flu,
Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and now SARS-CoV-2" (Phillips & Catrambone, 2020, para. 5). (The 2019-nCoV was renamed SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses [Gorbalenya et al., 2020]).
The World Health Assembly also stated:
Nurses and midwives play a vital role in providing health
services.. .are often the first and sometimes the only health professionals that people see and the quality of their initial assessment, care and treatment is vital. They are also part of their local community, sharing its culture strengths and vulnerabilities, and shaping and delivering effective interventions to meet the needs of patients and families (WHO, 2020a, para. 1).
As part of the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, the WHO in January 2020 specified key facts regarding the value of nursing and midwifery (see Table 1).
There has been a growing shortage of healthcare workers, with nurses and midwives representing more than 50% of this shortage (WHO, 2020c). In this article,...