Nursing 12 Hour Shifts

Areas of Concern
Sleep, Fatigue, and Recovery Between Shifts One of the most prominent aspects of nurses’ lives that are detrimentally impacted by working 12-hour shifts is their sleep. Research shows that extended work schedules and sustained shift work, such as that seen in 12-hour shifts, can interfere with nurses’ abilities to achieve adequate sleep by reducing the number of hours for physical and cognitive recovery and the number of hours that can be devoted to sleeping between shifts (Geiger-Brown et al., 2011; Geiger-Brown et al., 2012). Geiger-Brown et al. (2012) found that on average nurses working consecutive 12-hour shifts were sleeping less than six hours per night and were experiencing progressive increases in their reported
In addition to the damaging effects 12-hour shifts have on patients’ safety and health, these extended shifts also have a direct bearing on patients’ satisfaction with their nursing care. As one study showed, patient dissatisfaction with the care they received increased proportionately with the number of nurses in the facility that had been working shifts longer than 13 hours; conversely, patient satisfaction with their nursing care increased incrementally with higher quantities of nurses who had worked 8-9-hour or 10-11-hour shifts (Stimpfel et al., 2012). In the cases in which the patients were dissatisfied with the nursing care they received, they most commonly complained about poor communication, inadequate pain management and pain assessments, and a delay in the nurse answering their calls for help (Stimpfel et al., 2012), highlighting other specific areas of nurses’ performance being detrimentally
three 12-hour shifts per week) rather than more frequent and shorter shifts (i.e. five 8-hour shifts per week), as a three-day workweek provides the nurses with more flexibility in terms of their work-life balance (Stimpfel et al., 2012). The perceived benefits associated with a 12-hour shift (i.e. more days off per week, better work schedule flexibility, and in some cases, more time off between shifts) ultimately result in increased freedom and time for socialization or other household responsibilities (Chen et al., 2013). In a recent study conducted by Stimpfel et al. (2012), it was found that greater than 80% of the nurses interviewed were satisfied with the scheduling practices, which included 12-hour shifts, utilized at the hospitals at which they were employed. However, despite this reported scheduling satisfaction, it was also discovered that the percentage of nurses reporting job burnout, overall job dissatisfaction, and intention to leave their current jobs increased incrementally as the shift length increased (Stimpfel et al., 2012). More specifically, the research shows that job burnout and dissatisfaction and the intention to leave a nursing position is 2.5 times greater among nurses who work shifts longer than 8-9 hours compared to nurses who work shifts that are shorter than 8-9 hours (Stimpfel et al., 2012). It is thought that the