Experiences of nurses with mandatory use of facial PPEs to combat pandemics

The use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) has always been a fundamental issue in the daily life of nursing care. PPEs should be used in the right way to control hospital infections. People visit different health points like in primary health care prevention but can get infected with other diseases which could be one of the reasons why some people tend to avoid hospital visits even when it would be necessary but only opt to go for treatments or check-up when their health conditions have gone worse. During the pandemic of Covid-19, many people preferred to stay away from hospitals in fear of getting infected with the deadly virus. The use of PPEs has a proper procedure always remembering the aseptic way. During the outbreak of Covid-19 the availability or shortage of PPEs especially during the beginning or peak times of 2020 was a highly discussed issue in bid to protect the patients and health care workers (HCWs) especially frontline workers who are always mainly nurses. This thesis is a literature review about Nurses' experiences with mandatory use of facial PPEs to combat pandemics. The purpose of this literature review was to describe nurses’ experiences with mandatory use of facial PPEs to combat pandemics. The research question was ‘’What kind of experiences do nurses have with mandatory use of facial PPEs to control the spread of air borne diseases?’’ The aim of thesis is to use nurses’ experiences and develop new nursing practices to promote proper use of facial PPEs to reduce infections from airborne diseases and combat pandemics. This used as guidance for other health care professionals especially nurses and nursing students always must endeavour do what is right according to the stated protocols and nursing ethics. In the health care field, it is always easy to learn from fellow colleagues and always try your best and provide the best care to the patients. Literature review method was used, and data was collected from Sage, Science Direct, EBSCOhost and Google scholar and using the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 7 articles were identified and analysed using the inductive content analysis and six main categories: fitting problems, skin reactions, basic needs, scarcity of PPEs, poor service delivery and administration failure were identified. The study can be referred to by governments and hospital administrations to know how to prepare for any other pandemic that could come up in future. For future recommendations, more study is needed using action-based research. Keywords: Nurses’ experiences, Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs), Pandemics