Challenges of work-family conflicts in nurses during the Covid-19 pandemic and its management strategies: a review study

The covid-19 epidemic is one of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare system today. Currently, nurses, as the main members of the treatment team, are experiencing many conflicts when it comes to balancing work and family. The purpose of this study was to identify the challenges associated with work-family conflict in nurses and find an effective solution for managing it.

The present study is an integrated review and includes Farsi and English articles extracted from internal databases SID, MAGIRAN and IRANDOC and external databases PubMed, EMBASE, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, ProQuest, SCOPUS and CINHEAL in the period from 2019 to 2022 using The keywords of nurse, work-family conflict, coronavirus and covid-19 were used separately, combined and their English equivalent using Boolean operators. The inclusion criteria included qualitative, quantitative and mixed studies, which addressed the challenges of work-family conflicts of nurses and had obtained an acceptable score in Gifford's quality assessment.

Out of a total of 256 related articles, 21 eligible articles (18 English articles and 3 Persian articles) were reviewed. The results show that the challenges of work and family conflicts of nurses in the era of Corona in 3 levels of organization-based challenges; Individual-based challenges and family-based challenges were obtained.

Changing boundaries and family-work balance during the covid-19 pandemic has led to an increase in conflicts in the nursing profession. This is the result of existing concerns about the contagiousness of the virus and the mental and health changes related to the nature of this disease. In this regard, by using family and organizational support and individual training in dealing with crises, the amount of these conflicts in nurses can be reduced.