Iranian Nurses Facing covid 19: Experiences, Challenges and Opportunities

Being at the center of risk and taking responsibility for caring of covid 19 patients has attracted a lot of media and professional attention to nurses and the nursing profession and has helped to create a new image of them in all countries in crisis. Professional ethics and medical ethics were constantly rethought during this crisis, leading nurses to a different understanding of the importance of their professional roles. The present article seeks to recognize the lived experience of Iranian nurses in the Covid 19 crisis. For this purpose, through semi-structured interviews with sixteen nurses involved in service delivery and thematic analysis of the results, categories such as negative emotions and high stress in the early stages, positive attitude changes and empirical experience were extracted. The importance of rethinking the biomedical discourse and its multifaceted and generalized effects on the status of the nursing profession were other results of this study. This study points to the importance of nurses' expertise and technical knowledge along with the multidimensional nature of this profession as a profession that requires technical and cognitive knowledge. It also emphasizes the importance of psychological and legal support and the need for multifaceted attention to the situation of nurses and their role in the overall health system, especially in pandemics, multilateral measures and the importance of discourse developments in the field of health.