DDRIG: From SARS to COVID-19: Nursing, Knowledges, and Trauma

Nurses are essential to contemporary hospital-based healthcare. Healthcare providers’ work requires frequent contact with patients within a hospital that is often rapidly changing. Hospitals prioritize certain forms of expertise and render other knowledge and labor invisible.

Nurses experience trauma and stress in their everyday work from the social structure of the hospital to the unique demands and risks of healthcare givers. Nurses are most likely to be diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This project examines nurses' experiences of trauma within the specific historical and cultural context of nurses' expertise, skills, and labor in healthcare.

By focusing on nurses' often invisible skills and knowledge, this project will identify the implications of that invisibility for nurses' risk of exposure and well-being. This project carries key lessons and insights for healthcare workers, policy makers and administrative decision makers.

This project focuses on nurses' invisible knowledge and labor by doing ethnographic interviews with nurses, trauma experts, and workplace health and safety experts, as well as participant observation at a hospital. It asks the following research questions: 1) how does devaluing nurses' practices, skills, and knowledges also obscure the preventable exposures, risks, and trauma laden in the everyday work of nursing, and in what ways are they subverted or sustained? 2) how might centering nurses' experiences with PTSD also offer insight into the roots of nurses' working conditions during pandemics such as COVID-19?

This project contributes to research discourses in STS and medical anthropology on the development of professional knowledge and techniques, where nurses' expertise and skills are often ignored in a replication of existing healthcare hierarchies. By beginning from nurses' knowledges the project will reveal how stress and trauma can become embedded within technical knowledges in high stress professions.

By locating nurses' experiences of trauma and stress within the broader dynamics through which nurses develop, learn, and share skills and knowledge, this project will explore how essential and fragile their role is within healthcare. The outcomes of this project will inform the development of policies to support and sustain healthcare workers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.