Nursing institutions have been forced to revise their curricula and change to improve their teaching approaches based on the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Chan et al. (2021) point out, one of the challenges that nursing institutions have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic is shifting from classroom-based instruction to online learning. When countries impose restrictions limiting movement and social gatherings, nursing institutions had to make abrupt changes to deliver instruction online. The process was very slow owing to the technicalities involved, a factor that affected the completion of pre-licensure nursing education programs. The rate at which competent graduate nurses were released to the job market slowed down thereby worsening the problem of nursing shortage globally (Chan et al., 2021). Leaders of nursing institutions have made efforts to improve their systems to ensure that as many nurses as possible are able to complete their licensure and pre-licensure programs to help address the nursing shortage.
Conclusion
COVID-19 has caused numerous impacts on nursing some of which are positive and others which are negative. An example of a negative impact on nurses is the high rates of deaths among nurses after contracting the disease at their places of work. Improvement of the nursing curriculum to provide nurses with pre-requisite skills that they did not have before is an example of the positive impacts of COVID-19 on nursing. Countries should use lessons learned from these impacts to improve their healthcare systems and the nursing profession in particular.