The large numbers of patients admitted to intensive care units due to COVID-19 has had a major impact on healthcare professionals. The incidence of mental health disorders among these professionals has increased considerably and their professional quality of life has suffered during the pandemic. This study aims to explore the impact of the provision of COVID-19 patient care on ICU healthcare professionals. A mixed methods study with an exploratory concurrent design was conducted between June and November 2020 in the Balearic Islands, Spain. Data were collected using a self-report online survey (n = 122) based on three validated questionnaires, and individual semi-structured in-depth online interviews (n = 11). Respondents scored 2.5 out of 5 on the moral distress scale, moderate/high on the compassion satisfaction scale, and moderate on the burnout and compassion fatigue subscales. Age was significantly and negatively related to professional quality of life but was positively related to workload and unavailability of protective equipment. Three main groups of themes relating to the impact of the pandemic emerged from the in-depth interviews: (a) clinical, (b) professional, and (c) personal and family impacts in the two waves. ICU healthcare professionals should be viewed as second victims of the COVID-19 pandemic as they have suffered significant psychological, professional, and moral harm.

The idea of agency has long been used in the nursing literature in the study of nurses' roles regarding the patients they take care of, but it has not often been used to study its relationship with nurses themselves and their status in the healthcare system. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the idea of agency is used in nursing research to better understand how we might advance our thinking around nurses' agency to shape nursing and healthcare with an emancipatory intent. Based on the results of a literature review focused on the study of conceptions, treatments, and applications of the concept of agency in nursing, we present a critical discussion to reflect on the need to consistently define the idea of nurses' agency, to guide research concerned with this topic in theoretical frameworks with emancipatory and social change tenets, and to make a call to develop the idea of agency as a central one to rework nurses' relationship with themselves. The idea of agency provides a valuable analytical framework for the study of a wide range of issues around nurses' status in healthcare organizations and in the healthcare system while offering a means for nurses' emancipation.

This article aims to present the life and work of German thinker Hartmut Rosa as a philosopher of interest for nursing. Although his theoretical framework remains fairly unknown in the nursing domain, its main key concepts open up a philosophical and sociological approach that can contribute to the understanding of a wide range of study phenomena related to nurses, nursing, and healthcare. The concepts of social acceleration, alienation, and resonance are useful to explore healthcare organizations' performance by bringing the time dimension of modernity to the center; to grasp nurses' experiences of caring for patients; and to understand nurses as agents endowed with the capacity to deploy their political agency to create alternative forms of relationship to themselves, to others, and the world, challenging the institutional order of healthcare organizations when it fails to resonate with their professional ethos. In this article, we propose Hartmut Rosa's theoretical framework as a new and inspiring phenomenological and critical lens that should be further explored to advance knowledge concerning phenomena that are found at the crossroads of the nursing domain and other fields of knowledge.

The selection of the voices that make up a qualitative research project is of great importance since the knowledge gained about a certain object of study depends on it. Qualitative researchers focus on the voices around which the purposes of their research explicitly revolve. However, they do not customarily pay attention to peripheral voices, which are primordial to understanding the complexity of the phenomenon studied. In this article, we fill in the literature gap regarding the inclusion of peripheral voices as participants in qualitative research. We develop a five-stage methodological and practical guide to identify who the peripheral voices are, how to plan their approach, how to listen to them and how to analyze their narratives. We illustrate its practical application using the results of doctoral research focused on the construction of the nurse’s status in healthcare organizations. We conclude by discussing the potential of their inclusion in qualitative research.

Critical discourse analysis is a set of theoretical and methodological devices used to analyze and challenge how we construct reality by looking for meaning behind words. The process of conducting critical discourse analysis is complex and, in the field of nursing research, is often carried out without regarding the different dimensions entwined in discourse. In this vein, the dimension that concerns the linguistic characteristics of texts is a highly informative one, but all too often left out of study results by researchers in nursing. This article aims to present some methodological notes of our experience conducting an analysis of linguistic characteristics within a critical discourse analysis doctoral research. We discuss the theoretical and methodological reasons why these characteristics should be widely recognized as a fundamental dimension in the framework of critical discourse analysis. We propose general recommendations to make this dimension of analysis more easily accessible and encourage other critical researchers to include the analysis of linguistic characteristics of texts in their research.

Organisational justice has emerged as a key area of interest given the challenges of protecting the health and well‐being of nurses in healthcare organisations. Existing research shows significant conceptual and methodological limitations that must be addressed to achieve a more comprehensive and ethically grounded understanding of nurses’ needs in the healthcare system. This article explores how nurses experience their working conditions within public healthcare organisations through a theoretical lens of social justice to unveil the systemic injustices embedded within them. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, this study draws on 31 semi‐structured interviews with nurses working within the public healthcare sector in the Balearic Islands (Spain), informed by Nancy Fraser's feminist theory of justice. The findings illustrate that nurses conceptualised organisational justice as the condition that allows them to practice their profession in accordance with their professional ethos. This novel understanding of organisational justice underscores the economic, social, cultural and political manifestations of gendered injustices nurses face in their daily practice and that prevent them from being considered as peers in the social life of healthcare organisations. This study highlights the imperative to rethink organisational justice through a lens that accounts for the gendered nature of care and nursing work. Nancy Fraser's theory of justice emerges as a groundbreaking framework that offers novel insights to guide this transformative endeavour.