ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic is thought to have made visible who is essential and who isn’t during crises. Nurses in particular appeared as the backbone of COVID management efforts, deemed especially valuable for the sound implementation of public health directives and provision of patient care. Numerous media stories also emerged about nurses who endured grueling work conditions, repeated distress over unnecessary patient deaths, and reprisals for speaking up about the mismanagement of the pandemic. For many nurses, the pandemic spelled a new era in which their daily reality, their expertise, and their contribution to patients’ wellbeing were finally recognized and appreciated: at last, nurses and their work were becoming obvious to everyone, from lay people and the media to healthcare administrators and elected officials. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which the pandemic made nurses highly visible in some respects while simultaneously reinforcing their longstanding invisibility in the collective consciousness. I highlight the risks of naively misreading the pandemic as a turning point in nursing history, one that would finally give nurses their rightful place in policy arenas. I argue that signs point instead to the further entrenchment of the status quo for nurses. This includes narrow understandings of nurses’ complex and varied expertise, the exclusion of nurses from key decision processes, the increased value of nurses as interchangeable and disposable workers, and the perception of nurse whistleblowers as a problem needing to be reined in. Rather than hope that lessons were properly learned and that administrators and decision makers will do right by nurses in the post-COVID era, nurses must own the processes that make them visible and reclaim the narratives that shape nurses’ identity and agency.
