Nurses’ Lived Experience, Part 1: The COVID-19 Pandemic

More than 100 years elapsed between the emergence of COVID-19 and the last severe pandemic—the Spanish flu of 1918.¹  That pandemic too took an enormous toll on nurses.²  With the increasing frequency of disasters and public health emergencies occurring in the world, the 2020-2030 Future of Nursing³  report recognizes the significance of having a healthy and well-prepared national nursing workforce to respond to such events. Thus, what nurses endured during the COVID-19 pandemic—their collective lived experiences—may offer a powerful learning tool as we plan for the future.⁴ 

As world-renowned phenomenologist Max van Manen⁵  describes, lived experience is a starting and an ending point. It is a textual expression of reflexive reliving of something meaningful about a phenomenon. Thus, lived experiences gather significance as we remember and give meaning to them. In doing so, lived experiences “demand us to relearn to look at the world as...