During the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked as a nurse in an aged care home, and due to the staffing shortage, there was a need to put extremely high schedules for the working staff and, at the same time, ensure the well-being of the patients. This led to several mental health problems within the staff, and as a nurse in charge, I had to manage an extremely hard situation to get the tasks done. This was exacerbated by the sickness of patients, which was transmitted to the staff or vice versa, which made time management always impossible and led to exhaustion among the workers.
Within these settings, there is no experience since most people are experiencing the pandemic for the first time in their lives. Despite having lectured at the university on medical handling in emergencies, no one was prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the staffing shortage and intense stress were hard to cope with for most of the staff and patients. The emotional trauma that many nurses had because of a tight schedule was hard to overcome, but I have attempted to use my time management knowledge to organize, at least partly, a schedule in this extreme situation.
When attempting to get a scholarly perspective on proper time management and the tight situation in the pandemic, it is vital to consider different articles. The research shows that it is crucial to keep a sufficient workforce, which includes contingency planning, hiring, and staffing rosters (Aitken et al., 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic provides a special circumstance that necessitates a shorter turnaround time from the creation of recommendations to their execution. It is crucial in these situations to offer staff mental health care but doing so is challenging. To prevent long-term psychological harm and workforce turnover, mental health therapy should be made available (Cousins, 2020). Better time management in constrained settings will follow as a result.
From the perspective of myself, the main other influence was unpreparedness for such a situation and the chaos that it caused in my initial thoughts and actions. The key external influence on the situation was the lack of understanding of the situation on the governmental level. This was reflected in ambiguous policies and a lack of adequate staffing and training for nurses who were urgently transferred between different facilities. These bureaucratic procedures made time management and scheduling even harder since everything could have been changed within days. This external influence hindered the implementation of proper time management practices.
From these experiences, I have learned how important time management and safety in administration can be. The extraordinary pandemic situation, which caught most of the healthcare facilities and aged care homes by surprise, put serious pressure on the nurses and the healthcare system in general. At the same time, acknowledging the importance and administering schedule management can help to ensure the provision of care even in extreme situations.
The situation and reflections on it put forth the issue of safe time management and the responsibility for the patients. This became extremely evident in the setting of the aged care home, where patients are more dependent on nurses than anywhere else. After research, numerous consultations, and personal reflections, I assume that this experience taught me a lot. Whether extreme situations will be present in the future or daily practice, I am now more prepared to handle them properly.
References
Aitken, G. E., Holmes, A. L., & Ibrahim, J. E. (2021). COVID‐19 and residential aged care: priorities for optimizing preparation and management of outbreaks. Medical Journal of Australia, 214(1), 6-8.
Cousins, S. (2020). Experts criticize Australia’s aged care failings over COVID-19. The Lancet, 396(1), 1322-1323.