Summary of Position Paper
Nurses encounter many difficulties on the job such as working long hours, which results in fatigue and inadequate patient safety. Fortunately, the American Nurses Association who supports nurses’ rights and lobbies on healthcare related matters has taken a stance in support of this issue. In their position statement, Addressing Nurse Fatigue to Promote Safety and Health: Joint Responsibilities of Registered Nurses and Employers to Reduce Risks facilitates measures to be taken by nurses and employers to alleviate nursing fatigue and decrease the risks in providing patient safety.
The ANA stance is that it is the nurses ethical responsibility as well as their employer to place the measures necessary to avoid the
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This starts with the nurses declining assignments when they know they are unable to provide optimal care having worked extended hours. It is the employer 's responsibility to take into account nursing schedules to accommodate a healthy work culture where there is an equal life work balance and nurses are given enough time to recuperate from prior shifts. The ANA has made recommendations for nurses and employers to combat this problem. Nurses are suggested to receive 7-9 hours of sleep in a conductive sleeping environment, take account commute to work prior to accepting a job offer, as well as alternative transportation to and from work such as taxi bus, car pooling. As for the employers, limit work weeks to 40 hours, work shifts to 12, and utilize predicable schedules so nurses plan accordingly. The ANA recommendations are in effort on the part of the nurse and employers to ethically and effectively provide efficient patient care by reducing the amount of work hours a nurse can work to help balance and equal work life balance as well as reduce nursing fatigue.
Impact of issue on nursing
Nurses
It should be taken into consideration that one aspect is that extended hours can affect the nurses overall health. For instance, in the ANA position statement, it is referenced that shift work impacts the safety and health of nurses and was associated with sleep disturbances, mood disorders,
Pamela F. Cipriano, President of American Nurses Association was in disbelief to see how she has tried to enforce the Nightingale pledge of keeping patients free from harm was failed because medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. As of now ANA has conducted yearlong campaign named “Safety 360 It Starts with You” in order to reduce and take measurable advances to protect the welfare of nurses and workers. It is one of campaign that the ANA comes with that is in support to both the nurses and patients. However, in the real-world nurses are stress and fatigue due to patient ratio. In my workplace, which is a state hospital, they have full time nurses on call where nurses work more than 70 hours a week. The nurses
West, Ahern, Byrnes and Kwanten (2007) indicate that the new graduate nurses may have not worked full-time in the past; given that graduate nurses begin their career with a full-time job can lead to exhaustion. It was discovered that shift work leads to desynchronisation of physiologically determined circadian rhythms which has a major psychobiology effect and it is commonly perceived the effects of shift work contribute to graduate nurses attrition rate. The NGNs often have a high level of stress due to disturbed sleeping patterns, as they find to adaption to shift work or rotating work hours difficult. Eventually, it leads to feelings of lack of job satisfaction, exhaustion and spending of less time with their friends and family, which can eventually could lead to burnout (West et al., 2007).
12-Hour shifts have constantly been an argument in the field of nursing. This topic interests me because there is constant jitter around this topic, to whether if it’s safe, or not. This can be taken into view from the patients view and also the nurses. Nurses should not be allowed to work 12-hour shifts because, the physical and emotional impact on their bodies is too debilitating, and the length of the shifts could be a potentially hazard to the patients.
Within the recent years, hospitals and medical facilities have been experiencing nursing shortages that necessitate more nurses to be present to compensate for the care needed to be given. This requires nurses to be dealt with imperative extended work hours along with their normal shifts with no denial or excuse accepted. Working extra hours are accompanied with negative effects that have an impact on the nurse, coworkers, and patients. A major concern that occurs with overtime is that nurses become fatigued or burnout. Fatigue that is experienced is a result of sleep deprivation from working overtime that is associated with arduousness neurobehavioral functioning
Patients in a hospital and/or healthcare facilities have to be cared for all day and all night, everyday of the week by nurses. The usual way to fulfill this need is to divide up the day into three 8-hour shifts. Different shifts have been put into place to help improve nurse satisfaction, decrease the nursing shortage and save the hospital money. The 24-hour day is made up of two 12-hour shifts; 12 hours in the day and 12 hours at night. There has been quite an ongoing debate over the years regarding this issue of nurses working over 8 hours in a single day. Many people, such as hospital nursing administrators, have reason to believe that working long hour shifts causes more errors in
When nurses work for long hours with no rest, they are prone to fatigue thus leading to poor performance and an increase in errors. These effects are risky to the patients, nurses, and the health care centers. According to research, heavy workload on nurses
A nurse’s typical day isn’t without stress; it is usually a lot of complex planning, critical thinking, time management, an abundance of communications with all departments of the hospital, and documenting events that have happened throughout the day on their entire patient assignment. “Nurses who are mandated following the completion of their regular shift are often ill-equipped to continue working. They have not planned for that situation with: proper advanced rest, arrangements for
When nurses experience fatigue due to excessive overtime, effects that can occur are reduced decision making ability, reduced communication skills, increased forgetfulness, increased tendency of risk taking, reduced ability to handle stress on the job, decreased ability to do complex planning, and inability to recall details which can all danger patients wellbeing. Unfortunately even with all the
Nurses have many responsibilities and take on various roles. Besides playing the role of a caregiver, nurses are also educators and are responsible for their patients’ knowledge of their health and medications. Nurses are also advocates that act upon the patient’s wishes and protect their rights. The workload that nurses are responsible for leave nurses more susceptible to experiencing burnout. In addition, short-staffing can also put more work to the already overwhelming workload that nurses have. Lastly, long shifts may also contribute to this burnout syndrome that nurses suffer from. More nurses than ever are switching from eight-hour shifts to twelve-hour shifts as this schedule shortens their work weeks (Stimpfel, Aiken & Sloane, 2012). However, there is limited research on long shifts and its impact on the well being of nurses and the quality of care provided. The purpose of this paper is to compare eight-hour shifts and twelve-hour shifts and their impact on nurse burnout. For nurses working in the hospital settings, does working eight-hour shifts compared to twelve-hour shifts result in less
Berger and Hobbs (2006), argued that modifying external factors such as diet and exercise, the amount of shifts worked consecutively, and the food and beverage intake patterns will reduce the negative health effects associated with shift work on nurses. Some of the main topics that the researchers focused on are:
“Burnout has been widely studied in the health service profession, and nursing is recognized as one of the occupations with the highest burnout prevalence rates” (Harkin & Melby, 2014, p. 152). Nursing burnout affects many nurses in the profession in one way or another. In the nursing world, a typical shift length is now twelve hours or longer. This shift length has changed from the past in which nurses worked a normal shift of eight hours. While there are benefits and disadvantages to each of these shifts, there has to be a regulation of total hours worked in a week. Nurses who work at the bedside of critically ill patients witness marked human suffering (Sacco, Ciurzynski, Harvey, &
Did you know over 1 year, more than 12,000 patients care is at risk because, nurses aren't getting the adequate amount of sleep. In order to stop fatigue in nursing, nurses should not be able to work over 40 hours per week. If nurses are needed for overtime they should receive at least an hour break before starting the next shift.
For the month of July, the American Nurse Association is emphasizing on sleep hygiene for safety reasons. Addition to their intense 12 hour shifts; some nurses are sacrificing their breaks and lunchtime to finish charting if they want to end their shift on time. We often neglect nurses’ health, which can ultimately cause undesirable outcomes for both patient and nurses in the long run. Delivering the best care for the patients is a constant goal for nurses, yet they struggle to find the time to balance healthy schedules. Eventually exhaustion will occur causing nurses to be fatigue and unable to carry out their duty at their optimum level.
However, other studies have found that nurses’ healthiness is not undesirably affected by the 12 h shift (Dwyer et al., 2007; Jennings and Rademaker, 1987; Kaliterna and Prizmic, 1998), and some have established that it can essentially have affirmative well-being benefits, comprising a substantial reduction in individual symptomatology in the areas of overall health, cardiovascular associated illnesses, anxiety and frustration (Eaton and Gottselig, 1980), reduced emotional exhaustion (Stone et al., 2006; van Servellen and Leake, 1994) and consumption more healthily (Freer and Murphy-Black, 1995). One study found that nurses employed 12 h shifts involvement suggestively less compassion tiredness than those working for 8 h (Yoder, 2010). A smaller quantity of studies have reconnoitered the connection among work hours and the probability of incident or injury to nurses but these too have self-contradictory results. One study found that the danger of ‘drowsy driving’ doubled over and the risk of actuality involved in a motor vehicle crash or near motor vehicle crash nearly doubled when driving followed shifts exceeding 12 and a half hours in period (Scott et al., 2007). However, additional study found no changes stated in trouble driving home pre and post carrying out of 12 h shifts (Mills et al., 1983). Trinkoff et al. (2006a) found that employed 13 h or lengthier was considerably related with prevalence of neck, shoulder and back injury/complaint, even though Lipscomb et al.
The work environment may exacerbate fatigue in nursing causing them to leave because they cannot provide good care to patients (Purdy, N., Spence, K., Finegan, J., Kerr, M., & Olivera, F., 2010). Gellasch conducted a study (2015) which concluded increased shift lengths put nurses at risk for exacerbating fatigue, causing them to make errors, and forcing them to leave the clinical care setting due to lack of support from colleagues and employers, and inadequate staffing. Chan, Tam, Lung, Wong, & Chau’s (2013) study showed that there is differences between the nurse’s ideal and the actual reality of nursing practice, leading to job dissatisfaction because nursing is stressful with the most common stressor being heavy patient workload. According