Via the City University of London: Investigating the impact of COVID-19 on newly qualified nurses. Excerpt:
Nurses are at the heart of our NHS, but many leave the medical profession soon after qualifying, with 30–60% of nurses leaving their first place of employment within one year. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the transition from student to nurse even more challenging.
For the last 3 years, researchers at City, University of London School of Health Sciences have studied 190 newly qualified Barts Health NHS nurses. The nurses received regular questionnaire surveys, as well as face-to-face and telephone interviews, designed to measure depression, anxiety, stress, and burnout, along with resilience and work environment. Half of the nurses were given psychological skills training to see if this was an effective intervention.
Using £29,000 funding from Barts Charity, the researchers are building on previous work which studied the pressures on nurses in their first year of qualifying. In this follow-on study, the research team will look deeper into the effect that COVID-19 has had, and how organisations can better support nurses.
COVID-19 hit during this initial study and provided researchers with an early insight into how the pandemic added to the pressure on these newly qualified staff. The initial data indicated that the nurses were significantly affected by their experiences and that more than 25% had experienced symptoms related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In the study, one nurse noted: “There have been lots of situations with handling dying patients whose families are unable to come and visit and if they are allowed only one is allowed to visit. This has been very distressing.”
Another said “the stressful experience was looking after patients who were acutely unwell with COVID. I found it stressful because there was little we could do for patients other than give them oxygen, so that added to the feeling of helplessness.”
The Barts Charity seed funding will allow the project to be developed further, with researchers now looking at the long-lasting effects of COVID-19, the main causes of distress and PTSD symptoms and how they can be mitigated, including the relationship between the nurses’ resilience and PTSD symptoms. The funding follows a £3m grant for staff wellbeing at Barts Health NHS Trust and signals its commitment to supporting NHS staff across East London.
This follow-on study aims to provide practical recommendations to assist the NHS in better understanding the wellbeing and psychological support needs of early career nurses – not just at Barts Health NHS Trust, but across the country.
