The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease) a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO, 2020). This triggered a series of responses from political leaders the world over to curb the spread of the infection, so that everyone—but, most importantly, health services—can cope with what is to come, and lives can be saved.
Nurses in the UK have been warned that dealing with the pandemic may require them to be more flexible in terms of their practice: many in academia or who have retired may be requested to engage in clinical work once more. For community and district nurses, this may not be a difficult task, as they already have a range of skills and are used to improvising and adapting. However, it could mean refreshing competencies or developing new ones to be able to work in acute care and deal with a highly infectious disease.
District and community nurses are now being trained to perform testing for COVID-19 in the community, in order to reduce the strain on hospitals, clinics and GP surgeries (Jones-Berry, 2020). However, concerns have been raised that this is bound to negatively affect already over-stretched district nursing services in the country.
Further, given that community and district nurses provide community and homecare, they are the ones most likely to contract the disease from exposure to infected patients or their families—self-isolation is naturally not possible when working in the community. These nurses are in the unenviable position of wanting and needing to help, but at the cost of their own health and safety. These are conundrums that will require calm thought and skill to resolve.
Another important consideration with regard to the pandemic and community and district nurses is that the people for whom these health professionals care are the ones most susceptible to the severe consequences of COVID-19—those older than 70 years with serious underlying comorbidities. Now more than ever, infection prevention and control practices will need to be followed with rigour and diligence if these vulnerable members of society are to be protected.
And with self-isolation, how do we combat the problem of loneliness—an issue that older people who live alone are well known to face (NHS, 2018)? This is an aspect where our value as humans will be tested and is something we should all be thinking about creatively.
Encouragingly, the rate of the infection is reducing in the epicentre in China, with few newly infected people there. Similarly, South Korea undertook mass screening in affected cities, and citizens adopted voluntary social distancing, which seems to have brought the spread of the infection under control. Undoubtedly, this has come at the cost of civil liberties, and the UK Government must decide on its priorities in these unprecedented times and weigh the economic ramifications of the pandemic against the cost to human life. And for us all—the health sector, the Government and the general public—it is the time to wash and lend hands, not wring them.