Please email Rachel Taylor at ractaylor@health.unm.edu to get more information or to schedule an appointment.
Researchers at the University of New Mexico are inviting you to take part in a survey and phone or audio/visual interview about your experiences caring for people with COVID-19. We are recruiting nurses from different parts of the country and in different healthcare settings, and from different clinical areas, including inpatient psychiatry. You have been identified through publicly available sources or by using existing contacts in emergency management agencies or hospitals within and outside of the Department of Veterans Affairs at local, regional, and national levels.
This project is part of an ongoing effort, a Nursing Call to Action, started by the Veterans Emergency Management Evaluation Center (VEMEC) in 2014 to improve nursing readiness and to provide leadership and guidance to health care facilities and systems regarding issues related to high consequence infections (pandemics) and the provision of nursing care. The objectives of this pilot study are to 1) Understand the experiences of nurses providing care to patients with COVID-19, 2) Examine nurses’ perceptions of organizational strategies to best support nursing response and practice during a disaster (e.g., unit/local/facility policies implementing crisis standards of care, provision of personal protective equipment, support for personal preparedness), and 3) Examine nurses’ perceptions of policies (e.g., organizational, local, county, state or federal) that support or hinder the nursing response.
Nurses who have experienced caring for patients with COVID-19 and related issues of personal protective equipment, crisis standards of care, personal preparedness and family issues, stresses of caring for seriously ill patients with a highly infectious disease, and for those in the critical care areas dealing with high rates of patient mortality, have the potential to identify local and systems factors that contributed to what helped support the nurses and their ability to provide care and what did not.
