Towards a Notion of Relational Sacrifices: Nursing during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Wuhan

Abstract

In this article we critically examine the depiction of nurses as sacrificial, heroes and angels fighting on the frontline of the war against COVID-19 against the lived experience of Shanghai-based nurses who volunteered to be seconded to treat COVID-19 patients in a hospital in Wuhan, China. In the article, we argue that the military discourses of soldering and war and the discourses of heroic sacrificial nurses become conflated during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we challenge the discourse of ‘necessary sacrifice’ with that of an empirically grounded discourse of ‘relational sacrifice’ based on the lived experiences of these nurses who treated COVID-19 patients on the wards of hospitals in Wuhan, and the lived experiences of their families, back in Shanghai. In the article, we examine three major themes that emerged from our empirical fieldwork and related data, namely: relational sacrifice, the lived reality of nursing COVID-19 patients and the camaraderie experienced between nurses and patients during the pandemic.