‘I have really learned how to smile with my eyes’: risk work and embodied care practices among nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark

The COVID-19 pandemic placed health sectors across the world under great pressure in terms of acute care and infection control. Policies responding to the latter led to a change in working practices among health practitioners, including nurses. The changes included establishing new patterns and protocols of risk work to mitigate infection risk in hospitals, but these new ways of working were somewhat incompatible with embodied practices of care. Our small-scale study, based on in-depth qualitative interviews with nurses in Danish hospitals in March 2021 (n = 9) indicates that, amid this crisis of embodied practices, nurses established new ways of caring, and built up close relationships with patients through verbal explication and exaggeration. At the same time, the findings also demonstrate the limits of these new practices in caring for specific groups of patients, such as children. In this context, we found examples of the breaking of risk-mitigation protocols in order to establish caring relationships with young patients. Yet some of these young patients belonged to the small group of children at risk of developing serious illness in the case of a potential COVID-19 infection. We analyse these problems in risk work and caring through a framework drawing on social theoretical approaches to risk and embodiment.