Koren Ainat, Alam Mohammad Arif Ul, Koneru Sravani, DeVito Alexa, Abdallah Lisa, Liu Benyuan
Solomont School of Nursing, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, United States.
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, United States.
JMIR Form Res. 2021 Dec 10;5(12):e31358. doi: 10.2196/31358.
Nurses are at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, nurses have faced an elevated risk of exposure and have experienced the hazards related to a novel virus. While being heralded as lifesaving heroes on the front lines of the pandemic, nurses have experienced more physical, mental, and psychosocial problems as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak. Social media discussions by nursing professionals participating in publicly formed Facebook groups constitute a valuable resource that offers longitudinal insights.
This study aimed to explore how COVID-19 impacted nurses through capturing public sentiments expressed by nurses on a social media discussion platform and how these sentiments changed over time.
We collected over 110,993 Facebook discussion posts and comments in an open COVID-19 group for nurses from March 2020 until the end of November 2020. Scraping of deidentified offline HTML tags on social media posts and comments was performed. Using subject-matter expert opinions and social media analytics (ie, topic modeling, information retrieval, and sentiment analysis), we performed a human-in-a-loop analysis of nursing professionals' key perspectives to identify trends of the COVID-19 impact among at-risk nursing communities. We further investigated the key insights of the trends of the nursing professionals' perspectives by detecting temporal changes of comments related to emotional effects, feelings of frustration, impacts of isolation, shortage of safety equipment, and frequency of safety equipment uses. Anonymous quotes were highlighted to add context to the data.
We determined that COVID-19 impacted nurses' physical, mental, and psychosocial health as expressed in the form of emotional distress, anger, anxiety, frustration, loneliness, and isolation. Major topics discussed by nurses were related to work during a pandemic, misinformation spread by the media, improper personal protective equipment (PPE), PPE side effects, the effects of testing positive for COVID-19, and lost days of work related to illness.
Public Facebook nursing groups are venues for nurses to express their experiences, opinions, and concerns and can offer researchers an important insight into understanding the COVID-19 impact on health care workers.
护士处于新冠疫情的前沿。在疫情期间，护士面临更高的暴露风险，并经历了与新型病毒相关的危害。尽管在疫情前线被誉为拯救生命的英雄，但由于新冠疫情的爆发，护士经历了更多的身体、心理和社会心理问题。参与公开组建的脸书群组的护理专业人员在社交媒体上的讨论构成了一个有价值的资源，提供了纵向的见解。
本研究旨在通过捕捉护士在社交媒体讨论平台上表达的公众情绪，探讨新冠疫情如何影响护士，以及这些情绪如何随时间变化。
我们在一个面向护士的公开新冠疫情群组中收集了2020年3月至2020年11月底超过110,993条脸书讨论帖子和评论。对社交媒体帖子和评论中已去除身份识别信息的离线HTML标签进行了抓取。利用主题专家意见和社交媒体分析（即主题建模、信息检索和情感分析），我们对护理专业人员的关键观点进行了人工介入分析，以确定高危护理群体中新冠疫情影响的趋势。我们通过检测与情绪影响、挫败感、隔离影响、安全设备短缺以及安全设备使用频率相关的评论的时间变化，进一步研究了护理专业人员观点趋势的关键见解。突出显示了匿名引语，以增加数据的背景信息。
我们确定，新冠疫情以情绪困扰、愤怒、焦虑、挫败、孤独和隔离的形式影响了护士的身体、心理和社会心理健康。护士讨论的主要话题与疫情期间的工作、媒体传播的错误信息、不当的个人防护装备（PPE）、PPE的副作用、新冠病毒检测呈阳性的影响以及与疾病相关的工作日损失有关。
脸书公共护理群组是护士表达其经历、意见和担忧的场所，可为研究人员提供重要见解，以了解新冠疫情对医护人员的影响。
