Page 5 - Top Nurses 2021

SPECIAL EDITORIAL SECTION
NURSING LEGEND
NURSING LEGEND
AnnMarie Papa, DNP, RN, CEN, NE-BC,
FAEN, FAAN
Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer EINSTEIN MEDICAL CENTER MONTGOMERY, EAST NORRITON
Barbara Wadsworth, DNP, RN, FAAN
Chief Operating Officer, Executive Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer
MAIN LINE HEALTH, RADNOR
HERE TO SERVE continued from page 36
BEFORE EVERYTHING “
ELSE, I’M A NURSE.
I WANT MY NURSES TO KNOW THAT I’M IN IT WITH THEM.”
—ANNMARIE PAPA
cases put a tremendous burden on nurses, who act as de facto family members and medical liaisons to other hospital staff. “In the beginning, no one wanted to go into rooms with COVID patients,” Papa says. “It was, ‘Let the nurses do it.’”
The psychological strain on nurses was apparent almost immediately, so much
so that Villanova University launched CHAMPS, a national study to evaluate the real-time health and well-being of COVID
first responders. “We were concerned
about the emotional welfare of healthcare givers, from physicians to people who clean hospital rooms,” says Donna Havens, a professor and the Connelly Endowed dean of the M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing at Villanova University.
Launched in April 2020, the study garnered responses from more than 2,500 healthcare workers. Nurses caring for COVID patients reported traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and sleep disorders. “The nurses are wounded by this experience— they use the word ‘haunted’—after the horrific conditions under which they have worked,” Havens wrote in comments that accompanied the report.
Those conditions were exacerbated by life in quarantine away from family and friends, leaving them as isolated as their patients. Neumann University offered
its vacant student dorms as housing for nurses working in local healthcare facilities. “We’ve tried to recognize and support
“
“EVERY DECISION WE MADE, EVERY
CHANGE WE MADE IN THOSE DECISIONS, WE EXPLAINED WHY WE DID IT AND HOW IT MADE [OUR STAFF] SAFER.”
—BARBARA WADSWORTH
nurses in our community,” says Kathleen Hoover, dean of Neumann University’s division of nursing and health sciences. “The lack of information we had in the beginning of the pandemic does not compare to any other infectious disease I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Chief nursing officers took swift action to support their staffs and other hospital
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