Sanity is madness put to good use. – George Santayana
The Perils and Pitfalls of Working Night Shifts
14Aug2011 Author: Mother Jones, RN
I wonder how many cups of coffee an average night nurse consumes during their shift. Look, there’s someone we can ask, although it looks like her caffeine buzz is wearing off. Notice the telltale chin to chest head tip that gives sleep deprived nurses away. She may look like she’s charting, but she really is in a twilight sleep.
Working nights isn’t for wimps. Neither is working holidays and weekends. You are always short of help, and BIG things seem to go wrong just as the day shift staff heads out the door. I always thought that I was just paranoid about working the off shifts, but Muhammad Saleem from RN Central sent me some information that validated my observations. I’ve posted their research results below. I’ve lived through a lot of these situations. I’ve seen seasoned nurses nod off at the desk at 3AM because they’ve been working their butts off, and I’ve worked with doctors who don’t answer pages promptly during evening hours and on weekends even though they are on call. I’ve also worked with new residences who are unable to write coherent orders until the third week of their rotation. Sometimes I’ve wondered why more things don’t go wrong in a hospital.
I think their information looks accurate. What do you think?
Research and design by Nursing Schools Site
3 Responses to “The Perils and Pitfalls of Working Night Shifts”
Leave a reply
Disclaimer
There has been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about medical bloggers and HIPAA regulations so let me make this very clear: I write composite stories about many different people that I've cared for over the years.
Michelle
August 30th, 2011 at 12:05 am
This is soooo true…..I have been a night nurse on a psych unit for 3 years…….and all my colleagues KNOW the problems come out at night.
Cathy Lane RPh
September 5th, 2011 at 9:46 pm
Working nights for several years with same crew, we learned a few things to help get through rough times.
It was only when day shifters refused to make concessions to what their bodies could tolerate that they exposed a weakness to the work situation.
Folks that worked night shifts regularly had to stand together for the lifestyle that working in the wee hours of the morning forced them.
Night shift workers had to stand their ground and demand some of the same perks day workers received without question, such availability of nutritious food, not salty or overly sweet highly processed food from vending machines, to be able to regular breaks even if skeleton staff, to be able to communicate freely with bosses (believe me, it was disconcerting for day shift people to make decisions for the night shift without their input–and then reprimand us if we didn’t accomplish goals to the day shift expectations).
Another trick from day shift was…leaving things unfinished for nights to ‘pick up after’, yet expecting everything to be done to day shift expectation when they arrived at 7:00 AM expecting to spend the first quarter of an hour ‘getting ready’.
Our patients came first, but sometimes day shift failed to realize night shift had different things to do under different circumstances and less personnel. Besides, the tiredness factor!
I recall a conversation during a midnight supper break with my tech in which I literally fell asleep talking to her. Bodies craving sleep at 3 AM had a few alternatives, walk in the fresh air, turn on a cold fan, drink another hot cuppa, and pray for time to fly by quickly!
Do you remember mideastern night shift workers coming on duty prepared with extra underwear and p.js. in case they had to stay the night due to weather conditions? We had nurses that slept on the top floor of the nursing school across the street from the hospital due to rising flood waters, heavy snowstorms, and impending tornadoes, all in one year.
I remember one year when there was a flu epidemic and we had patients in emptied offices, locker rooms, the chapel, and hallway surrounded by folding screens, and to top it off, the lake below the hospital flooded and the overworked sump pumps could no longer keep the water out of the lower areas, so the water supply in the hospital was shut off and bottled water trucked in.
I remember one year in which all the superlatives of living in Fargo, North Dakota occurred; worst drought (the water tasted like the bleach used on the Red River water source), hottest summer, closest tornadoes to the hospital, worst snowstorm, most snowfall in 2-3 days (100 inches!), first wettest spring in 100 years–it was said that it was the worst in the previous hundred years…now, the river floods practically every year. I did not miss one day at the hospital due to weather conditions…I could walk, if not for any other reason.
Tacit
October 5th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Nifty blog. Useful perspectives for a non-nurse like me to see. The poster-like graphics in this post are quite helpful. In point #3 of the causes, I was sorry not to see (something like) “lack of continuous improvement in processes”. I am convinced that we can do much more in that area — at least than we can do about budgets (increasing which would likely only mean we would pay more for the same dysfunctional systems). Thanks for your dedication to the blog.