ICU staff burned out not just from crisis itself, but from being out of sync with it
Swedish researchers found that healthcare workers' emotional exhaustion during COVID-19 came less from the crisis itself than from organizational and societal timelines that moved on while the ICU remained in crisis mode. The mismatch between when managers, the public, and clinical staff thought the emergency should end created moral injury that traditional burnout interventions may miss.
Originaltitel: From anticipation to exhaustion: Phase-specific emotional responses among frontline healthcare workers during COVID-19
This article examines how intensive care staff navigated the emotional and temporal complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on qualitative data from two Swedish ICUs. Rather than treating emotional responses as secondary reactions to crisis, the analysis shows that emotions were deeply embedded in professional feeling rules, organizational hierarchies, and the poly-temporal unfolding of the pandemic. Divergent interpretations of when the crisis began and how it should be managed generated early interprofessional tensions, as physicians and nurses drew on different emotional regimes and temporal orientations. As the crisis evolved, moral emotions – including frustration, guilt, pride, and betrayal – served as ethical signals that reflected clinicians’ commitments to a broader moral economy of care. These emotions became especially salient as scientific advances, societal reopening, and managerial discourse shifted public and organizational timelines in ways that diverged from the ongoing crisis time of the ICU. The cumulative result was an intensification of compassion fatigue, driven not only by prolonged exposure to suffering but by temporal misalignment, unresolved moral tensions, and eroding opportunities for meaningful emotion work. The study contributes to crisis-management scholarship in the following way: it offers a phase-sensitive analysis of emotional responses in a prolonged crisis, showing how emotions shift across anticipatory, acute, and protracted phases of a pandemic. Second, it advances crisis-management and sociology of emotion scholarship by conceptualizing poly-temporality and demonstrating how temporal misalignment becomes a mechanism shaping emotion work, moral emotions, and interprofessional tension. Third, it reframes compassion fatigue not solely as a cumulative emotional outcome but as temporal-moral phenomenon that intensifies when institutional, societal, and clinical timelines diverge. Through these contributions, the article shows that crisis is not merely a clinical or organizational disruption, but a temporally uneven, emotionally structured process negotiated through profession-specific feeling rules.