Strategies Used for Management of Patients with COVID-19: A Comparative Study of Iranian and Chinese Nurses’ Experiences

Background: Medical infrastructures, application of control strategies, and proper implementation of logistic policies are vital for successful management of an epidemic in a country, but all of them are under the influence of the health and management policies of countries. Thus, this study aimed to compare the strategies used by Iranian and Chinese nurses for management of patients with COVID-19. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted based on the conventional content analysis method of Graneheim and Lundman approach. Participants were recruited by purposeful sampling among the nurses working in the COVID-19 wards of Shariati Hospital in Tehran, Iran, and Haikou Hospital in Hainan, China. Data were collected by conducting semistructured interviews from August 2020 to February 2021. Then, the differences in used strategies by the nurses in the two countries were investigated using the data were analyzed using MAXQDA-10, qualitative data analysis software, and descriptive analysis technique. Results: In-depth interviews were carried out with nine Chinese and ten Iranian nurses. With "Managers as the key element to overcome the crisis" as the main category, six categories and 22 subcategories were excluded from the Iranian interviews. With "Action to control crisis" as the main category, eight categories and 19 subcategories were excluded from the Chinese interviews. Conclusions: Nursing managers in China focused on the process of training nurses to take care of patients with COVID-19 and reducing the transmission of infection among health care workers. However, nursing managers in Iran focused on compensating the shortage of nurses, shortening the duration of patients' hospitalization, daily monitoring of nurses' performance, and ventilator settings of patients.