(WXYZ) — It's been nearly five years since the start of lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that we've returned to normalcy, nurses are reflecting on the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the most stressful times in their careers.
With the anniversary approaching, I sat down with healthcare workers to hear how things have changed.
“I just kept thinking, you know what would happen to my patients? What would happen to my family?" Jacquelyn Unger, the director of nursing at Corwell Health East, said.
“It was also a time of a lot of trauma. I mean there was a lot of trauma amongst our healthcare workers and our staff," Dr. Nick Gilpin, the infection prevention medical director at Corewell Health East, said.
The entire world was at war with a faceless enemy and unsure what it was and how to defeat it.
"It was daunting, it was exhausting, it was scary. But we wanted to be here because we knew we wanted to take care of our patients," Unger said.
These nurses were on the front lines of a virus the world was still discovering.
"We practice based on evidence. That we know what we’re doing is based on research and that it works and that we can be very confident in the care that we’re providing," Jennifer Kaiser, a nurse scientist and magnet program coordinator at Corewell Health West, said.
They are human just like the rest of us. It was their first time trying to care for patients during a global pandemic.
"We were a COVID unit, so it was, ‘okay we’re doing this.’ And then it literally, by the end of the day could be like, ‘okay, actually we need to change everything and we need to do this now,’ which as a lot of back and forth and we did that for a long time," Unger said.
During this time, Kaiser says nurses took on a lot of trauma and were unable to maintain a personal identity separate from their professional identity.
"When one becomes a nurse, they integrate the discipline into their sense of self and their personal identity. So it really means not just doing nursing, that’s your job, but you identify, I am a nurse regardless of where I am, regardless of what I'm doing even outside of work," Kaiser said.
She said nurses were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had, but weren’t sure if they could be confident in the new findings and protocol. due to the speed in which it was coming out.
She said there were mistakes made during the pandemic, but there was also a lot they could take away from the experience that will strengthen healthcare in the long run.
"There is a much more significant focus on nurse wellbeing and self-care mental health resources for those individuals," Kaiser said.
“They have all sorts of support groups. We have what we call an employee assistance program where we can get any sort of therapy or group sessions that we might need, we have people on sight to meet with staff and have done a lot of just debriefing and a lot of group building things to just talk about what we experienced," Unger said.
