Weathering the Covid-19 storm: The impact on health professionals

Abstract

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, health professionals have been on the forefront of delivering healthcare whilst experiencing unprecedented stress facing complex ethical situations, heavy workloads, long working hours and high levels of patient acuity and deaths (Fernandez-Parsons, Rodriguez & Goyal 2013; Talevi et al. 2020). Health professionals have continued to display a professional duty of care (Fernandez et al. 2020; Spoorthy, Pratapa & Mahant 2020; Valdez 2021) with, for example, reports of 97% of the frontline nurses in China expressing their willingness to work during the pandemic (Hu et al. 2020). This duty of care is embedded through professional education and socialisation of health professionals with expectations and norms about saving lives, relieving suffering and not abandoning patients (Turale, Meechamnan & Kunaviktikul 2020).