China’s Successful Recruitment of Healthcare Professionals to the Worst-Hit City: A Lesson Learned

The outbreak of coronavirus disease in 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan has led Chinese health authorities to recruit healthcare providers from the least-affected areas to provide care to the infected patients in Wuhan. We took further steps to explain some plausible reasons for their experiences. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to understand the subjective experiences, as well as the reasons for these experiences among the healthcare providers who had traveled from the least-affected parts of China to render aid during Wuhan’s COVID-19 outbreak. Using purposive and snowball sampling, healthcare professionals were recruited from three major hospitals in Jiangsu province. Semi-structured interviews were conducted from 1 September to 14 November 2020 in face-to-face contexts. Ten nurses and four doctors provided their informed consent for the study. The primary superordinate theme from the responses highlighted how social identity and individual needs were challenged by each individual’s professional ethics. COVID-19 not only presents significant risks to the health of nurses and medical doctors; it further challenges their emotional and psychosocial wellbeing. Care should be taken in allocating support and help, with the careful deployment of professional values and beliefs, so that any human resource as precious as medical doctors and nurses can be protected.