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Night Shift Nurses

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Working for long hours at night is a common practice for the nurses worldwide which has a negative impact on their performance. They can experience sleepiness drowsiness, lack of energy, and exhaustion. All of this can eventually result in poor thinking abilities and lethargy. Consequence of sleep deprivations can affect not only the nurses’ performance and health, but also affect the patients they deal with. This white paper discusses the prevalence, potential causes and consequences of this predicament along with global examples which indicate the dilemma of night shift nurses. Recommendations for solving this issue on individual and organizational level have also been given.

Night Shift work is considered to be an important part of providing …show more content…

They can also become more irritable. They can have poor health and rate of mortality also increases. A study on the sleep-deprived elder women revealed that they have less adverse health effects as compared to younger women. This means according to this study, greater age can be a positive factor as it leads to resistance to the health impacts of night time working (Mn, 2013).
The incidents of Fatigue in night shift nurses can be worsened in the night shift nurses that don’t have a holiday in a week and they don’t have a day off during a work. This means that working for more than 4 consecutive 12-hour shifts in a week can lead to problem of excessive fatigue due to prolonger working hours. This can also means that fatigue accumulated in the bodies of these night Shift nurses will take a longer time to go away and their recovery rime s also prolonged. A research done by Folkard and Tucker showed that the fatigue accumulated in the body due to prolonged working hours and successive work shifts might leads to higher rates of accident while driving. This study revealed that the risk rises by 6 percent on the second night working shift; and this risk reaches to 36 percent higher on the 4h day of working. Thus, night shift nurses who work on the successive night shifts has also been studied by Hanecke and colleagues which supports these …show more content…

Their body balance is disturbed and not getting sufficient sleep affects the working of their normal body functions. Metabolism can be affected and they can also experience sudden loss/increase of appetite. An evident dose-dependent relationship between duration of sleep and obesity has been noted, which shows that not getting enough sleep can lead to obesity. Night shift nurses can thus experience a plethora of health issues. According to the previous research finding, night shift nurses can experience change in their Glucose tolerance due to sleep restriction and can even lead to diabetes in female night shift nurses. Apart from that, the night shift nurses can also experience mood changes and other body problems due to the changes in their body hormones. Hormones that are linked with appetite like cortisol, and thyrotropin can also drop or rise due to sleep deprivation(Rogers,

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To become a successful nurse working during the night shift you should do the following. Use light exposure during the night shift and light restriction in the morning, practice good sleep hygiene, exercise regularly, use sleeping aids with caution, use stimulants and caffeine with caution, consider sleep medicine evaluation (Christensen 36). The most important thing to resolving this problem is to maintain a healthy lifestyle for example, they must have a good sleep schedule, exercise regularly, and also must have a healthy diet. If you are able to stay healthy then you will be able to make smarter decisions and be able to help more of the patients get back quicker. In order to keep everybody safe around you including the people and patients that you care about is that you must be able to keep healthy so you can make smart decisions and be ready for anything.

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Short staffing is one of the many challenges nurses encounter in the work environment. The impacts can be detrimental primarily to the patient’s outcome. To examine the effects of short staffing, research was conducted on 36,539 hospital inpatients to evaluate the amount of those exposed to an understaffed shift and how many patient outcomes resulted in a NSO (Twigg, Gelder, & Myers, 2015). NSO’s are nurse sensitive outcomes based on the nursing care provided to the patient. Patients exposed to short staffing had an increase of greater than one chance of NSO’s compared to patients not exposed (Twigg et al., 2015).

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If a nurse has not had adequate sleep, they will be putting themselves and their patients at risk. "The number of errors made by nurses increases when nurses work more than 12 hours in a shift or more than 40 hours per week (Lally, 2009). Nurses also play an important role in tracking down and correcting medical errors, "nurses may be the first and sometimes last line of defense in preventing errors before they reach the patient" (Lally, 2010). When sleep deprived your memory and cognitive abilities aren't functioning as normal, and as a nurse you need these skills functioning properly and quickly. Motor vehicle accidents are also a terrible risk they could take after working those long hours.

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Just like a saw needs to stop being used in order to be sharpened, a nurse needs time off to recuperate; it’s as simple as that (Covey, 1989). It is important not to burn the candle at both ends, working more than the designated shifts and longer than 12 hours should be avoided. An example used regarding medication errors and working too many hours involves a nurse working a double shift on a pediatric oncology unit didn’t correctly prime an IV line and caused cardiac arrest in a patient (Kelley, 2004). Although nurses work three days a week, their hours remain the same as other full time employees that work the typical 5 day schedule. A nurse’s time off should be valued because they are the last line for patient care, they are the ones administering the medication the doctor prescribes and the pharmacy makes (Kelley, 2004).

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