Impacts of mourning experience on pandemic COVID-19 and mental health of nursing team?

Abstract

Objective: to map the existing evidence in the literature on the grief experienced by nursing professionals during the Covid-19 pandemic and to discuss the repercussions for their mental health. Method: an integrative review, whose guiding question was: what is the scientific knowledge produced, so far, about the grief experienced by nursing professionals in times of COVID-19? The search was carried out in November 2020, in the databases Pubmed, Cinahl, Scopus and Lilacs, using the descriptors Coronavirus Infections; Bereavement; Nursing; Mental Health, reaching a total of 198 publications. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, a corpus of 04 articles was obtained. Results: The analyzed studies were carried out in Brazil and the United Kingdom. Two studies investigated aspects of mental health in coping with Covid-19 specific to the nursing team, one addressed all health professionals and the other surveyed health professionals and the general population. Discussion: In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, the experiences of mourning were permeated by feelings of fear, helplessness, hopelessness, moral suffering, stress, anxiety, depressive symptoms, Burnout and impotence, according to the studies analyzed. In addition, these researches also brought some protection recommendations for the workers' mental health, such as: support by call center by nurses specialized in mental health and call center by psychologists. Conclusion: The Covid-19 pandemic has generated countless changes in the lives of all people. For nursing professionals, daily living with grieving situations brings out feelings that can have an impact on their mental health. As it is a recent topic, there are still few studies that show the real impact of the pandemic on the mental health of these professionals, pointing to the need for more studies that can support actions to support bereavement during the Covid-19 pandemic.