Difficulties to care for ICU patients caused by COVID-19
2021-02-10
(Press-News.org) Researchers from the University of Seville's Nursing Department, with the collaboration of professionals from the ICU at Virgen Macarena University Hospital in Seville, have analysed the key factors in caring for critical COVID-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic. Their study concludes that nursing care was impacted by fear and isolation, which made it difficult to maintain the human experience of health care.
The break down in the humanising trend of ICU care during this period was mainly the result of the isolation of COVID-19 patients. This, along with the personal protection equipment worn by staff to prevent becoming infected themselves and the restrictions on family visits, made it more difficult to provide comprehensive and holistic care to individuals, as highlighted in the study.
Fear of the unknown, a lack of suitable protocols and adequate protective materials at the beginning of the pandemic, uncertainty in the face of an unknown and very deadly virus, together with the staff's fear of infecting their loved ones were the main feelings perceived by nurses. In fact, this situation led several of them to require psychological support and had a knock on impact on their ability to work optimally as they had up to the pandemic.
Fear of the unknown exponentially amplified negative feelings, causing emotions to emerge that they had never experienced in their working environment. Initially, the lack of material resources, personnel and protocols was a determining factor. However, as the weeks went by, management issues were overcome as greater insight was gained into the disease, leading to specific protocols being developed and implemented and improvements to the organisation of care.
To these factors, nursing professionals added the difficulty of working with nurses without specialised training in intensive care. Some of them had to join the ICU from other specialised fields as Covid-19 patient numbers rose. "Intensive care training is included in the bachelor's degree but much has to be left out for lack of time," explains Rafael-Jesús Fernández-Castillo, one of the study's authors. "We nurses fought long and hard for the intensive care specialisation. There is ample scientific evidence supporting the need for it with futile results on the part of the leaders. Therefore, better trained critical care back-up staff would have reduced the workload of the nurses in the regular team".
INFORMATION:
The study, which appeared in the journal Nursing in Critical Care, published by the British Association of Critical Care Nurses (BACCN), took a qualitative approach. To achieve its objective, 17 nurses of different ages, training and experience who worked at the ICU of Virgen Macarena University Hospital in Seville during the first wave of the pandemic (April 2020) were interviewed for the study.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-02-10
10,000 km2 of ice disappeared in a blink of an eye from an ice sheet in the Storfjorden Through offshore Svalbard, a new study shows. This dramatic break off was preceded by quite a rapid melt of 2.5 kilometres of ice a year. This parallels the current melt rates in Antarctica and Greenland and worries the scientists behind the study.
"Our measurements of the ice retreat in Storfjorden Through show that the prevailing conditions to the great break off, match what we see in Antarctica and Greenland today. It is uncanny. There are new studies published almost weekly, that show that the retreat of current ice sheets is two to four km a year and that it's speeding up." Says CAGE-professor and first author Tine Lander Rasmussen.
Climatically unstable period
The last deglaciation, ...
2021-02-10
Two-dimensional (2D) materials have a huge potential for providing devices with much smaller size and extended functionalities with respect to what can be achieved with today's silicon technologies. But to exploit this potential we must be able to integrate 2D materials into semiconductor manufacturing lines - a notoriously difficult step. A team of Graphene Flagship researchers in Sweden and Germany now reports a new method to make this work.
The technique, just published in Nature Communications by researchers from Graphene Flagship partners RWTH Aachen University, Universität der Bundeswehr ...
2021-02-10
New research from Trinity College Dublin suggests that older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety and less mentally restless than younger adults. The team at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) (today, Wednesday, 10th February, 2021) show that older adults appear to mitigate the negative aspects of cognitive decline by increasing motivation and adopting more efficient strategies to suspend the wandering mind when focus is required.
The study, published in the journal Psychology and Aging (American Psychological Association) is the first to adjudicate between competing theories of age-related ...
2021-02-10
In recent years, three meta-analyses of clinical studies have come to the conclusion that vitamin D supplementation was associated with a reduction in the mortality rate from cancer of around 13 percent. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have now transferred these results to the situation in Germany and calculated: If all Germans over the age of 50 were to take vitamin D supplements, up to 30,000 cancer deaths per year could possibly be avoided and more than 300,000 years of life could be gained - in addition, health care costs could be saved.
For several years now, scientists have been investigating the influence of an adequate supply of vitamin D on the ...
2021-02-10
Overfishing, hunting and intensive agriculture and forestry can sometimes contribute to plants and animals becoming endangered. New research from Lund University in Sweden and University of Toronto can now show why this leads to entire populations becoming smaller in size, as well as reproducing earlier. The study is published in the journal PNAS.
Researchers from Lund and Toronto are behind the study conducted on five different species of damselflies. They have studied how different environmental factors affect when and at what size the damselflies begin to reproduce. In the study, the researchers also shed light on how overfishing off the coast ...
2021-02-10
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The death of a vampire bat 19 days after giving birth presented scientists studying the animals in 2019 with an unexpected chance to observe a rare event: a female bat's adoption of an unrelated baby.
The researchers had captured common vampire bats in Panama as part of ongoing studies of the formation of cooperative relationships among strangers. The team used infrared surveillance cameras to observe six hours of vampire bat activity spaced over the span of each day.
Two unrelated and unfamiliar female bats were observed forming a social bond based on mutual grooming and food sharing that increased over time. The researchers had named them BD and Lilith.
Lilith ...
2021-02-10
Respiratory tract diseases in young animals of the cattle are a big issue for world agriculture and food safety because a bacterium that causes them is resistant to most antibiotics. A team of veterinarians from RUDN University developed and tested a complex preparation called gentaminoseleferon that could help treat respiratory infection in calves. The results of the study were published in the Veterinary World journal.
Bacteria of the genus Mycoplasma cause many infectious diseases in animals, including atypical pneumonia, other respiratory tract conditions, reproductive pathologies, arthritis, keratoconjunctivitis, mastitis, and so on. The genus includes about 200 species of bacteria, and all of them ...
2021-02-10
Every day, people die from simple infections even though they have been treated with antibiotics. This is because more and more bacteria have become resistant to the types of antibiotics that doctors can prescribe.
- It's a huge societal problem and a crisis that we must solve. For example, by developing new antibiotics that can defeat the resistant bacteria, says professor of chemistry at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark, Poul Nielsen.
Resistant bacteria are not only known from pig farms, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the pigsties disease-free. Hospitals are also experiencing with increasing regularity that, for example, infectious diseases cannot be controlled in patients. Thus, ...
2021-02-10
Can long-term stress lead to heart attacks? Most people would probably answer in the affirmative, but the scientific evidence of this is scarce. A new study by researchers from Linköping University in Sweden reveals that the levels of the stress hormone cortisol were increased in the months preceding a heart attack. The results, published in Scientific Reports, suggest that long-term stress is a risk factor for heart attacks.
"The levels of the stress hormone cortisol differed between people who have had a heart attack and those not affected. This suggests that cortisol in hair may be a new risk marker for heart attacks. We must take stress seriously", says Professor Tomas Faresjö from the Department of Health, ...
2021-02-10
Ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms (rAAA) are responsible for nearly 2% of all deaths in U.S. men over the age of 65. Endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) has emerged as a newer and less invasive alternative to open repair for rAAA, and current guidelines recommend EVAR as a first-line option for treatment of rAAA when certain criteria are met. But researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine have discovered that while EVAR is more commonly utilized for rAA, shortens hospital stay and has a lower initial mortality rate, the odds of ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Difficulties to care for ICU patients caused by COVID-19
