Nursing Perspectives on The Impacts of COVID-19: A Social Media Analytics Approach.

BACKGROUND Nurses are at the forefront of the COVID 19 pandemic. During the pandemic, nurses have faced an elevated risk of exposure and have experienced the hazards related to a novel virus. While being heralded as lifesaving heroes on the front lines of the pandemic, nurses have experienced more physical, mental and psychosocial problems as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak. Social media discussions by nursing professionals participating in publicly formed Facebook groups constitute a valuable resource that offers longitudinal insights. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to explore how COVID-19 impacted nurses through capturing public sentiments expressed by nurses on social media discussion platforms and how these sentiments changed over time. METHODS We collected over 110,993 Facebook discussion posts and comments in an open COVID-19 group for nurses from March 2020 until the end of November 2020. A de-identified offline HTML scraping on social media posts and comments was performed. Using subject-matter expert opinions and social media analytics (topic modeling, information retrieval and sentiment analysis), we performed a human-in-a-loop nursing key perspectives analysis to identify trends of the COVID-19 impact among at-risk nursing communities. We further investigated the key insights of the nursing perspectives trends by detecting temporal changes of comments related to emotional effects, feeling of frustration, impacts of isolation, shortage of safety equipment and the frequency of safety equipment uses. Anonymous quotes were highlighted to add context to the data. RESULTS We determined that COVID-19 impacted nurses' physical, mental and psychosocial health as expressed in the form of emotional distress, anger, anxiety, frustration, loneliness and isolation. Major topics discussed by nurses were related to work during a pandemic, misinformation spread by the media, improper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), PPE side effects, the effects of testing positive and lost days of work related to illness. CONCLUSIONS Public Facebook nursing groups are venues for nurses to express their experience, opinions and concerns and can offer researchers an important insight to understand the COVID-19 impact on health care workers. CLINICALTRIAL