Nursing Perspectives on the Impacts of COVID-19: Social Media Content Analysis

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 a social media discussion platform 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. Scraping of deidentified offline HTML tags on social media posts and comments was performed. Using subject-matter expert opinions and social media analytics (ie, topic modeling, information retrieval, and sentiment analysis), we performed a human-in-a-loop analysis of nursing professionals’ key perspectives to identify trends of the COVID-19 impact among at-risk nursing communities. We further investigated the key insights of the trends of the nursing professionals’ perspectives by detecting temporal changes of comments related to emotional effects, feelings of frustration, impacts of isolation, shortage of safety equipment, and 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 for COVID-19, and lost days of work related to illness. CONCLUSIONS: Public Facebook nursing groups are venues for nurses to express their experiences, opinions, and concerns and can offer researchers an important insight into understanding the COVID-19 impact on health care workers.