Until the late 1960s, nurses usually worked eight hour shifts. But in the early 1970s, that began to change and today the majority of nurses work shifts that are 12 hours or more. In a recent article on News-Medical, Jeanne Geiger-Brown, PhD, RN, and a researcher and associate professor at the School of Nursing, studied how nurses were faring 12-hour shifts. She recruited 80 hospital nurses and outfitted them with a wristwatch-like device that measured their sleep.
Geiger-Brown found that two-thirds of the RNs in her study got fewer than six hours of sleep between 12-hour shifts; one-third got fewer than five hours of sleep and some only had two hours of sleep. According to Geiger-Brown, “… many [nurses] don't leave their workplaces when their shift is over, but remain at work for 30 to 60 minutes or more to finish their activities and charting. Then there's commute time plus chores to do at home." What’s more, most of the nurses knew they were exhausted.
"When hospitals and nurses agreed that the 12-hour shift was a good thing, they risked a generation of nurses having ill health as a consequence of chronic sleep deprivation," says Geiger-Brown.
Nurses are no different from air traffic controllers—we’ve heard plenty about the need to alter their work hours. Even the need for doctors-in-training to get more sleep resulted in the 2002 Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education to reduce the number of hours a resident physician can work.
Should nurses really be working such long shifts? Is it good for them? Is it good for their patients? According to Geiger-Brown, there’s a need to “rethink the wisdom of the 12-hour plus shift as standard operating practice for all nurses…nurses and hospital administrators need to better understand "the mechanics" of sleep.”
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