Health And Marriage Concerns Associated With Shift Work

The negative impacts of shift work on workers’ health such as fatigue and sleep which are the main complain among the staff, job performance, psychosocial well-being, and job dissatisfaction have been

Before introducing the workplace issues related to the development of four-day workweek, a clear definition of this schedule is needed. According to Department of Labor (n.d.), “A workweek is a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, or seven consecutive 24-hour periods. The workweek does not have to coincide with the calendar week, but instead it may begin on any day of the week and at any hour of the day.” It might be the “four-day, 32-hour workweek – more leisure, less work” (Wernette 1), or the “three-day, 40 hour, compressed work week” that Vega

Moreover, most shifts run into each other with day shifts extending into the night and night shifts extending into the day. This means that their circadian rhythms are distorted. Extended shift work for nurses eventually lead to them finding it difficult to adapt to normal life or any activities outside work.

It is problematic that healthcare professions work rotating shifts because this impedes on the ability of the human body to function properly. Rotating shifts means that everyday their shifts are at different times and different lengths of time. The human body needs to be in line with the environment and when the sun is up the body naturally is awake and alert and during night time the body goes dormant to sleep, this is called circadian rhythm. The body has a circadian clock and when this is disrupted this can lead to depression and anxiety. This can lead to exhaustion and irritation that can cause someone to make mistakes. This can also lead to sleep debt and cause insomnia that can affect the mental alertness. Sleep allows the body to fight

In the nursing profession, especially when working in a hospital, it is not uncommon to have 12-hour nursing shifts,

Throughout the years there has been more attention directed towards healthcare worker fatigue. More specifically, fatigue associated among night-shift nurses. The Joint Commission has found that lack of sleep from night shifts has contributed to increased errors, leading to poor patient outcomes (Gardner, Dubeck, 2016).

The researcher assumes that shift work leads to nursing fatigue and multiple health issues. Shift work in nursing will eventually lead to an increase in medication errors and needle stick injuries. Researcher also assumes that lack of sleep will affect nurses’ well- being and decrease patient satisfaction. The researcher came to this assumptions based on the multiple research studies performed on shift work and the negative findings found related to shift work.

A member of staff who regularly works for at least 3 hours during the night period are referred to as night workers. The night period is between the hours of 11pm to 6am, unless the worker and employer agree a different night period but this must include midnight to 5am and the shift must be at least 7 hours long. This must be agreed in writing.

In the medical field, residents’ work hours were reduced down to 80 hours per week in 2003, and the ACGME is still proposing further restrictions. Outside of the medical field, truck drivers are limited to solely eleven hours of driving, given a ten-hour break; along with railroad workers, who must also take a ten-hour break before starting a shift. Another time demanding profession is aviation, in which their administration allows pilots to fly only sixteen consecutive hours, and if a flight delay were to extend that pilot’s shift, then they must switch (Townsend & Anderson, 2013). It is said that the IOM only limits nurses to work twelve hours in a twenty-four hour period, although it is not implemented very well and there is research to prove it.

This learner can recommends that it will be up to the nurses to be willing to make substantial changes in their behavior. Managers may be urged to consider altering the starting times of shifts whenever possible to make schedules more compatible with circadian rhythms. Avoid scheduling employees to work more than two or three consecutive night shifts and to providing adequate recovery time between shifts, especially when between night and day shifts. Hours of service regulations, where applicable, should also be considered in the development of a fatigue management program.

Since the early days of nursing when nurses would work extended shifts and even lived on the wards where they worked, nurse fatigue has been a much discussed issue. During the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, workers spanning several industries fought for the eight hour work day and eventually won with the passage of the US Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 (Miller, 2011). In the years since then, the extended shift has again become popular, particularly in the field of nursing. Though many nurses and organizations laud twelve hour shifts as beneficial to staffing needs and personal lives, the risks to patient and nurse safety must be considered.

The term 12 hour shift is used to refer to a two shift system associated with an extended working day, as supposed to an eight hour workshift. Twelve-hour shifts have become the normality and standard shift option for nursing over recent years across the United States (Harris, Sims, Parr, & Davies et al., 2014 p.606). Longer work hours are viewed as a positive impact on recruitment, potential financial savings, retention, and enhanced continuity of care (National Nursing Research Unit, 2013; NHS Evidence, 2010). However, it’s also evident that longer shifts result in nurse fatigue, errors, and reduced alertness. The concept of longer hour shifts have become quite the controversial topic among the healthcare system.

Nurses who worked in hospitals have shifts because people who are in the hospital need 24-hour care and if you're a nurse who works at a school or an office you won't need to work shifts you would just work at regular fixed work hours.

The fatigue associated with working the night shift was brought into the spotlight after an aircraft incident that occurred on June 10, 1990. British Airways flight 5390 had just departed from Birmingham International Airport when the aircraft experienced a rapid pressure loss due to the pilot’s windshield blowing out of the aircraft. This resulted in the pilot being sucked halfway out of the aircraft and another flight crew member grabbing the pilots belt and holding him from being sucked completely out while the copilot to take control of the aircraft and land it safely at a nearby airport. The official findings of the accident investigation linked the windshield blowout to the wrong size bolts being installed. The bolts were installed early in the morning hours and the fatigued shift maintenance manager who installed them didn’t recognize that they were the wrong bolts. He thought that the countersinking on the window was unusually large (Baron, 2009). This is just one example of mistakes made on night shift due to fatigue. Fatigue is a dangerous human factor that is present in the aircraft maintenance community.

It is my opinion that shift work is another potential hazard to me as an employee in the Healthcare Industry. It is my belief that employees on nightshift work or those working irregular hours may be more susceptible to errors and accidents, mainly due to fatigue or