Sources and symptoms of stress among nurses in the first Chinese anti-Ebola medical team during the Sierra Leone aid mission: A qualitative study

Liu, Chunzi; Wang, Huaming; Zhou, Lin; Xie, Hui; Yang, Huiyin; Yu, Yanbo; Sha, Huayan; Yang, Ying; Zhang, Xin

A total of 15 nurses were included in the first military anti-Ebola medical team. A purposive sampling method was used and the inclusion criteria were as follows: a registered nurse; working as a nurse in Sierra Leone and directly involved in the care of EVD patients; directly involved in hospital restructuring and Sierra Leone medical staff training. A few nurses did not directly care for patients, as four nurses worked on infection control and one nurse was responsible for rear services. A total of 10 nurses were selected as the study participants, all of whom were females and nurses-incharge. Table 1 summarizes the general information about the interviewed participants. The qualitative sample size was determined by data saturation; that is, a participant was excluded when data redundancy occurred during the subject interview and nothing new was added during data analysis [18] . The brief interview with the other 5 nurses provided no new information, and thus, data saturation occurred after 10 study participants.