Pain and Suffering: Experiences of Health Care Professionals in the Iran-Iraq War-A Content Analysis Study

Health care providers, especially physicians and nurses who have returned from war have valuable insight and tacit knowledge of current and future societies. The aim of this study was to explore pain and suffering experiences of health care professionals in the Iran-Iraq war.
This is a conventional content analysis of documentation available in libraries and electronic resources that was conducted in the years 2014 to 2016. Researchers simultaneously collected and analyzed data. A total of 119 written narratives of the 101 the health care providers during the Iran-Iraq war were collected, using a survey. The principles of conventional content analysis were used to analyze the data.
The analysis of the 952 pages of the written narratives of health care staff in the relevant literature led to the emergence 3 main themes. The main themes included “one step away from death”, “emotions”, and “tolerance of many hardships”. Sub-themes of “one step away from death” included injury and/or martyrdom of employees and their families, one step to captivity, one step to death, and feeling of danger. Sub-themes of “emotions” included uncertainty, sadness/discomfort, anxiety, hope, fear and panic, waiting, ambiguity and doubt, stress, anxiety, despair, intuition, and disgust towards the enemy. Sub-themes of “tolerance of many hardships” were experiencing hard situations, disruption of the normal life process, psychological tension, a gradual normalization of conditions, and return to normal life.
During the Iran-Iraq War, health care providers suffered a lot of suffering, from enduring hardship and difficulty in everyday life to feeling death is one step away. Transforming the experience and tacit knowledge of health care providers in the Iran-Iraq war to explicit knowledge can effectively identify and analyze challenges and provide strategies to prevent and manage similar scenarios. These results can produce the knowledge in the field of training of health care providers in unusual and critical situations.