Perspectives: Nursing students and COVID-19: challenges and coping strategies.

Abstract

We are writing this Perspectives piece from our position as educators of nurses and nursing students based in India in the hope that exposing some of the challenges we faced as educators, students and nurses, and the coping mechanisms we used, helps others during this ongoing pandemic. As readers will know, India has recently gone through a crushing second wave of COVID-19 which generated a great deal of fear amongst the public and healthcare workers, and now may well be entering further waves. During the first wave, student nurses were no different to others in their feelings of panic, despair and uncertainty. In order to help them, we established a student counselling team and crafted our teaching to enhance students’ knowledge and skills related to caring for people and preventing COVID-19 as our own knowledge grew. In this Perspectives piece, we hope to tell some of that story with the help of student’s voices.