Emotional risk work during the pandemic: Healthcare professionals’ perceptions from a COVID-19 ward

Abstract

In March 2020, COVID-19 wards were established in hospitals in Denmark. Healthcare professionals from a variety of specialities and wards were transferred to these new wards to care for patients admitted with severe COVID-19 infections. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a COVID-19 ward at a hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, including focus group interviews with nursing staff, we intended to explore practices in a COVID-19 ward by seeking insight into the relation between the work carried out and the professionals’ ways of talking about it. We used a performative approach of studying how the institutional ways of handling pandemic risk work comes into being and relates to the health professionals’ emerging responses. The empirical analysis pointed at emotional responses by the nursing staff providing COVID-19 care as central. To explore these emotional responses we draw on the work of Mary Douglas and Deborah Lupton’s concept of the ‘emotion-risk-assemblage’. Our analysis provides insight into how emotions are contextually produced and linked to institutional risk understandings. We show that work in the COVID-19 ward was based on an institutional order that was disrupted during the pandemic, producing significant emotions of insecurity. Although these emotions are structurally produced, they are simultaneously internalised as feelings of incompetence and shame.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• risk work
• healthcare
• emotional production
• institutional ordering
• institutional ethnography
• risk management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Nursing staff refers to both nurses and nurses assistants and refereed to as nurses or nursing staff.

2. An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a simple test that can be used to check the heart’s rhythm and electrical activity. Sensors attached to the skin are used to detect the electrical signals produced by your heart each time it beats.

3. The Capital Region and Region Sjælland were working on implementing Sundhedsplatformen, which is a digital solution that gathers information about each patient in a single electronic set of medical records. The aim was to create transparency and security for both patients and the healthcare personnel in Danish hospitals. Sundhedsplatformen was developed by Epic, a software supplier, who sold their solution to over 1100 hospitals serving more than 172 million patients. The software was tailored to fit the Danish healthcare system in collaboration with doctors, nurses, and experts in 2014 (Region H, b).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.