Covid-19-related Trauma and the Need for Organizational Healing in a Dutch Nursing Home

The nursing home sector was disproportionally affected by the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 and extreme mitigation strategies had to be taken in order to halt the spread of the virus. This research scrutinizes the manifestations of organizational trauma and healing amongst nursing home employees during the slow burning COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to advance the contemporary debate around organizational healing that exclusively investigate fast-burning crises by translating these theories to a slow-burning crisis. Using participatory action research, we conducted three months of visual ethnographic fieldwork in a small-scale nursing home located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands between October and December 2021. We present our findings constituting text and short videos according to the following four themes: (1) Emotional challenges in the workplace; (2) Cultural incompatibility of infection control strategies; (3) Navigating the ethics of decision-making; and (4) Organizational scars and healing perspectives. We propose the new concept of trauma distillation to describe and analyse how simmering organizational wounds are reopened and purified in order to trigger a prolonged healing process in the context of slow-burning crises. Ultimately, this may lead to the acknowledgement and acceptance of such organizational wounds as multi-layered and intractable, paving the way for a theoretical and empirical understanding of how to heal them. With the use of visual methods, we hope to contribute to this collective process of healing by offering employees the opportunity to share their stories and make their suffering heard.