JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic placed unprecedented demands on nurses and midwives worldwide, exacerbating existing workforce shortages and contributing to high rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and burnout in this population. Yet, the pandemic's impact on frontline nursing and midwifery care has not been systematically documented across diverse settings, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with limited research infrastructure.

Objective:

To conduct a large and extensive multinational study to capture nurses' and midwives' work and clinical practice experiences from March 2020 to December 2023. A secondary goal is to build research capacity among nurse-midwife collaborators through decolonizing research practices and equitable authorship.

Methods:

A pragmatic design guides this multinational, online, multiple methods study that captures the clinical practice, psychological, and professional experiences of nurses and midwives caring for suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients. The study collects qualitative and quantitative data in 27 languages on mental health, workplace conditions, and labor outcomes, alongside narrative accounts related to each topic. Natural language processing techniques, traditional qualitative analyses, and statistical analyses are used to analyze findings. Country-based teams collect data through social and professional networking approaches with a goal of recruiting n=300 participants or n=60 participants for small countries (e.g., island states).

Results:

To date, over 21,000 nurses from 76 countries have engaged with the study's online instrument, with 13,000+ completing more than 50% of all the questions. Findings will be disseminated through open-access publications, policy briefs, and multilingual webinars. New instruments will be psychometrically analyzed for reliability and validity as measures of nurses' pandemic response implementation experiences. Country teams will publish findings specific to their country, and the consortium will publish multinational analyses.

Conclusions:

This study addresses a significant knowledge gap by exploring the diverse and far-reaching impacts of the pandemic on this critical segment of the health workforce, with a strong emphasis on equity and capacity-building.