Registered Nurses’ Long Working Shifts (Essay Sample)

Registered Nurses’ Long Working Shifts: Relevance of More Hours During Shifts and The Influence on Quality of Work and Services Done by Registered Nurses
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Registered Nurses’ Long Working Shifts: Relevance of More Hours During Shifts and The Influence on Quality of Work and Services Done by Registered Nurses
There is such enormous work that needs to be taken care of in medical facilities, including attending to patients and clerical work that requires nursing personnel to work more hours during their shifts. However, nurses' long working hours during shifts are unnecessary since it causes so much exhaustion to nurses in a hospital. Consequently, resulting in poor standard care delivery in healthcare facilities by nurses, compromised safety of the medical team and patients, and nurses getting dissatisfied or bored with their nursing job.
The first consequence of nurses working more hours during their shifts is poor health services delivery. Traditionally practiced eight-hour shifts among nurses are becoming a practice of the past as nurses increasingly work twelve-hour shifts or even more. However, due to anticipated staff changes and fluctuating patient needs, actual shift lengths are often unpredictable. Consequently, nurses work unplanned overtime beyond the scheduled shift length. When nurses work for long hours without enough sleep or just having short naps, they are at risk of suffering from fatigue and burnout, compromising the expected patient care. There is a limit to human nature exhaustion; when one cannot deliver anymore or do it, it is below average (Brown, 2016). An exhausted caregiver in the hospital is not able to give the required attention to any patient. Some studies by scientists have shown that sleep deprivation can lower alertness and concentration (Brown, 2016). A sleep-deprived person finds it difficult to focus and pay attention hence more easily confused.
Therefore, when nurses work long hours without enough sleep during their shifts, they are at risk of experiencing drowsiness, interfering with the workplace's concentration, hence poor health care delivery.
Secondly, apart from inadequate health care service delivery, nurses working extra hours may compromise the medical staff's and patient's safety and healthcare facilities. By the very nature of the work, nurses are susceptible to injuries (Ofri, 2020). For instance, long working hours without sleep may result in a decline in neurocognitive performance, consequently leading to high fatigue rates. Fatigued nursing personnel is exposed to fatigue-related errors that could harm them, colleagues, and even patients (Rajan, 2017). What if an exhausted doctor handling medicine is packed in a glass bottle and the expected result when the bottle slips off the hands. What would happen when the same exhausted nurse is holding a syringe to inject a patient and the end outcome when the nurse loses focus for a bit. Furthermore, many patients with special attention, especially those in the emergency room, would not get enough care when the present nurses are all tired (Muzio et al., 2019). Critical patients in need of total special attention may suffer more when no nurse is focused enough to attend to them, and in rare circumstances, some may die.
Therefore, in a hospital of less attentive nursing personnel due to prolonged working hours, exhaustion may be messy and with casualties.
Finally, when nursing personnel is exposed to long shifts, they are likely to quit the job. An increase in nurses' shift lengths is associated with a significant rise in the odds of burnout, consequently, dissatisfaction, and an intention to leave the job. The typical adverse schedules for nurses cause many to quit their workplaces for temporary employment to where there is an opportunity to get control of work hours and get better pay (Rajan, 2017). Nurses' departure from their original workplaces to temporary agencies complicates the situation even further by creating a nursing personnel shortage, consequently continuing a cycle of adverse effects on the nursing schedule. Some healthcare organizations plan for relatively fair working shift schedules, and dissatisfied nurses would abandon their traditional centers for such working environments.
Undoubtedly, nursing personnel understands the nature of their work even before getting recruited to the nursing duties right from the point they undertake the course and later decide to look for employment. Furthermore, nurses are never forced to work long hours but just get advised to do so. Also, there are never enough nurses employed to share the duties. Because of the nurses' shortage, it would be unfair for a nurse not to extend working hours