Observatory: a platform the fight against Covid-19

Abstract

This poster presents the nursing observatory, developed by the Federal Nursing Council (Cofen). Its main goal is to understand the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic among nursing professionals. The Nursing Observatory is an information system with a structured electronic form, which allows the collection and analysis of data concerning the spread of Covid-19 among nursing professionals throughout the Brazilian territory. The creation and implementation of the Nursing Observatory resulted in a panel of indicators with the notification of infection cases and nursing deaths professionals by Covid-19.

1. Introduction

The most recent global data on the lethality of Covid-19 among nursing professionals released by the International Nursing Council (ICN) accounted for 1.500 deaths in 44 countries. ”The fact that the number of nurses killed in the pandemic is similar to those who died in World War I is shocking”, said Howard Catton, Chief Executive of the ICN, during the release of the death report [ 1 ]. At the time, from the total of deaths reported by the ICN, Brazil alone accounts for 567 deaths. In short, one in every three deaths due to Covid-19 among nursing professionals worldwide occurred in Brazil. Therefore, it is essential to create mechanisms that can follow the evolution of Covid-19 sickness among nursing professionals. For this reason, the Brazilian Federal Nursing Council (Cofen) created the Nursing Observatory, with the objective of monitoring contagion by Covid-19 among Brazilian nursing professionals. The Nursing Observatory 1 provides the leading indicators and monitoring of Covid-19 and nursing data on dashboards. For instance, the nEvelop-O CEUR Workshop Proceedings number of professionals who were infected, hospitalized, and died. These data are segmented by health institution, city, state, gender, age group, and date.

2. The Nursing Observatory

The Nursing Observatory is a digital platform for data management on case incidence and mortality due to Covid-19 in nursing professionals throughout Brazil (see Figure 1). The Nursing Observatory is a BI tool that facilitates the epidemiological analysis of the situation of Nursing workers in health services, providing real-time data to public managers in cities, states, and nursing councils for eficient decision-making. For the data to be accounted for by the tool, nursing professionals must declare themselves infected, and in the case of deaths, the technicians responsible for the nursing teams in each care unit are the ones who must register the information in the tool. Considering that registration on the platform is not mandatory, professionals may fail to inform, which will generate underreporting of cases. On the other hand, false information can also be entered. To minimize this, Cofen has a team that validates this information. They get in touch, via telephone, with the professionals or technical responsible for checking. In the case of deaths, the information is also checked with the Ministry of Health.

3. Conclusion

In Brazil, we did not identify any similar tool that allows monitoring cases of Covid-19 contamination in nursing professionals. After the Nursing Observatory was made available, several studies were carried out to analyze the, becoming a national reference in data sources on Covid19 in Brazilian Nursing. The platform has proved to be an essential tool for decision-making throughout the Brazilian territory, either by nursing entities or public managers of cities and states. It has also contributed to giving nursing professionals greater visibility and disclosing to the population and the press the precarious working conditions to which they are exposed.

References

[1] H. Catton , Icn confirms 1,500 nurses have died from covid-19 in 44 countries and estimates that healthcare worker covid- 19 fatalities worldwide could be more than 20 , 000 , 2020 .

[2] G. Alessi , Brazil has already lost more nursing professionals to coronavirus than Italy and Spain combined , El Pais, n.d.

[3] L. Souza , A. Souza , Brazilian nursing against the new coronavirus: who will take care for those who care? , Journal Of Nursing And Health 10 ( 2020 ).

[4] L. Albornoz , M. Herschmann , The ibero-american information observatories, communication and culture: balance of a brief trajectory , 2006 .