Nursing Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Introduction: Governance in nursing consists in decision making in accordance with the nursing professional’s leadership regarding the organization, as well as it responds to the needs of the stakeholders. The nursing profession has a key role in the management of the services and care provided as part of the emergency plan during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, until now, there is no clear picture of their governance or professional development during this crisis period.

Objective: To describe the nursing professional’s governance and their relationship with management during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: This integrative review was developed in the period from May to July 2022, with a compilation of full scientific articles available in Spanish, English and Portuguese and published between 2018 and 2022. The scientific articles came from the PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, Cuiden, SciELO, Lilacs and Latindex databases and their adequate methodological rigor was in accordance with the study design. The initial search yielded a total of 4267 bibliographic references. After the review, 20 articles that met the inclusion criteria were filtered and analyzed for subsequent categorization.

Conclusions: In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing will boldly persist with its ability for thinking, learning, adaptation and action as a healthcare workforce, and success will depend on empowering governance in the healthcare team. Nursing models should not only be oriented to the training and preparation of direct care nurses. In this respect, confidence, self-efficacy and skills in nursing management and leadership should be enhanced.