As the threat of COVID-19 reduces, it’s time to look after yourselves
Intended for healthcare professionals
Editorial     Next

As the threat of COVID-19 reduces, it’s time to look after yourselves

Nicky Hayes Consultant editor, Nursing Older People

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect nurses working with older people in many ways. We have been continually refocusing on the changing needs of our patients and residents, and of their families, while coping with the effects of lockdown on our own lives, and those of our friends and families. It’s been a tough time and we are not through it yet.

Nursing Older People. 33, 2, 5-5. doi: 10.7748/nop.33.2.5.s1

Published: 30 March 2021

Our cover feature on well-being (page 12) addresses the need for us to look after ourselves and to be looked after. It explores the effects of working through COVID on older people’s nurses, the teams they work in and the settings in which they deliver care. It also identifies some of the responses that are emerging.

Nurse leaders Jason Cross, Lucy Lewis and Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) chief executive Crystal Oldman speak for many of us when they describe how nurses feel exhaustion and a sense of emotional burden from working through the pandemic, but also pride in having risen to the occasion.

Larger organisations, such as the hospital trust where Jason Cross works, have been superb in allocating resource to well-being, but smaller service providers may have been challenged to achieve the level of resources that their workforces need.

Dr Oldman describes how the QNI responded rapidly by developing a ‘Talk to Us’ service offering nurses an appointment to talk through what was happening and how they were feeling with a trained nurse.

She provides a checklist of tips for mental well-being, including the all-important advice to find ways to relax and have fun, including keeping in touch virtually with friends or heading outdoors to exercise.

Make sure you take care of yourselves as we emerge from an exceptionally challenging year.

‘Nurses feel exhaustion and a sense of emotional burden from the pandemic, but also pride’

Share this page