12 Hour Shift

The traditional 8 hour shift for a nurse in a hospital setting is becoming extinct. More hospitals are going to 12 hour shifts which gives nurses a 3 day work week with more flexibility with their work and personal lives.The ability to fully understand how the length of a shift affects patient safety will help protect future patients from medical errors and will help improve the quality of care that they receive. This paper will explore nurses in the emergency room and if one shifts length over the other is more beneficial to the safety of their patients’.

Significance

The main purpose of this research is to better understand patient safety, quality of care, medical errors, the comparison of different shift lengths and the benefits to the

The articles look at how nurses become exhausted which leads to more medical errors when working twelve hour shifts, which in turn puts the patient at risk. Nurses tend to work unpredictable hours and even when they have a set time to be off, that often does not translate into reality. Most nurses end up working a lot of unplanned overtime due to changes in their patients needs and staffing issues, that along with already long shifts, patient care are at risk of being compromised (Witkoski.2012). Many professions such as physicians and residents,though it does not just stop with medical staff, have regulations in place on how many hours a week an employee can work but, nurses are not part of that group. States such as California and Maryland have adopted their own laws that prohibit nurses from mandatory overtime, but, they still have not set limits for voluntary overtime(Witkoski.2012). There is a thin line between mandatory and voluntary overtime seeing as many nurses feel pressured into “volunteering” for overtime by their supervisors. The shortage of nurses and the standing of the economy influences nurses to work longer shifts or extra shifts. In a European study, approximately 7,800 of the 31,000 nurse that were involved in the study and worked at least 12 hours,reported poor or fair quality of care and about 2,700 nurses reported poor or failing patient safety(Griffiths,P.2014). These numbers translate into below average ratings for patient safety and the quality of care they are receiving in relation to their nurse working a shift of 12 hours or