12 Hour Shift In Nursing Practice: A Case Study

Impact of Twelve Hour Shifts Nurses who work in the hospital setting normally work twelve-hour shifts which allows for fewer patient hand offs and more time away from work. Over the years, nurses have come to like these shifts because they have more time off to spend with family or attend to other activities or personal matters. Some nurses preferred the longer shifts because they felt less wore out overall than coming in four to five days a week while other nurses thought it was ludicrous for their employers to expect them to work at their best for such long hours especially on their feet (Ball, Dall’Ora, & Griffiths, 2015). However, there are serious consequences to twelve-hour shifts and these need to be taken into consideration when deciding whether twelve-hour shifts are the best practice for the nursing profession. This paper will examine the impacts of working such long hours on nurses …show more content…
Hospitals should reconsider their policy on using twelve-hour shifts over eight-hour shifts. The main reasons hospital facilities introduced twelve-hour shifts was to reduce hand offs, decrease the amount of money they were spending and they thought if they offered the shifts they would have more employee retention. The only statistics they should care about is real and unacceptable risks to patient safety and satisfaction as well as their employees’ health. The research presented in this paper is conclusive in showing that these statistics improve if shifts were to be shortened or if the nurse was given adequate recovery time. Fatigue is silent but deadly, not only to patients but also to nurses. This is why twelve-hour shifts that turn into more than twelve hours must come to an end and action must be taken immediately with a new policy implementation to not only save our patients, which is our number one priority, but to also save our