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- Genre: Academic theses
While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, America’s nursing work force continue to work in the most challenging of circumstances. While expected to hold the fort and continue on, deep inside, they bury an unprecedented level of acute stress, anxiety and depression. Peer support groups have been posed as a possible coping behavior. This cross-sectional designed project was developed to assess the worth and feasibility of a virtual peer support group with a focus on healthcare provider wellness during a period of surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overwhelmed staff, technology/documentation changes and challenges, competing clinical demands, short-staffing and Zoom fatigue were identified as the limiting factors for this project’s completion within its given timeframe. These findings informed of current barriers, providing a basis for future program development to mitigate the impact of psychological distress among healthcare providers. Evolving literature on this topic supports recommendations for further study and action by individual health care providers, organizations and at the state and national levels.
damage, immune system activation, impaired protein function, or aberrant DNA methylation. In the case of DNA methylation, I demonstrate that inhibiting DNA methylation dynamics can impair long-term memory formation, while the nurse-to- forager transition is not altered. These experiments could serve as the bases for and reference groups of studies testing the effects of metal or metalloid toxicity on DNA methylation. Each potential mechanism provides an avenue for investigating how neural function is influenced by the physiological status of non-neural organs. And from an ecological perspective, my results highlight the need for environmental policy to consider sublethal effects in determining safe environmental toxin loads for honey bees and other insect pollinators.