An Exploratory Study on Current Nursing Issues in the COVID-19 era through Newspaper Articles: The Application of Text Network Analysis

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This study was explored the current nursing issues in the COVID-19 era by analyzing newspaper articles. Methods: The search term "nurse"was used to collect newspaper articles from 2020. Pre-processing and semantic network analysis and topic group clustering were conducted using the NetMiner program to analyze the collected articles. Results: A total of 256 articles were identified, and four topics were extracted. The core keywords were "medical care", "hospital", "COVID-19"and "medical workforce". The extracted topics were "work environment related to response to infectious diseases", "utilization of nursing resources", "excessive nursing work", and "shortage of nursing workforce". Conclusion: Our findings provide useful information for understanding social perspectives of critical nursing issues in the COVID-19 era. Most of the extracted topics are the actual problems that nurses have faced for a long time. Now, nurses must proactively address current nursing issues to respond to national disasters and provide quality nursing care. © 2022 Korean Academy of Nursing Administration.