The nursing profession benefits

The nursing profession and its challenges

The nursing profession can be enormously rewarding, despite the fact that it is not without its hurdles, regardless of a person’s competence or licensure. Nurses face a slew of issues in their profession today, including lengthy and stressful work hours in complex healthcare settings.

The impact of long working hours in nursing

Because of staff shortages and a difficult economy, the speciality demands persons to work lengthy shifts; the latter has prompted experts to extend their shifts or end up working back to back. According to studies, nurses who work long hours are more prone to experience sleep deprivation, inability to recuperate between shifts, and weariness (Stimpfel, Sloane, & Aiken, 2012). Such experiences lead to the negative cognitive emotion that, in turn, results in increased patient’s dissatisfaction and the intent to quit their jobs because the nurses would be tired and disoriented due to lack of proper rest in between their shifts.

The need for adequate rest and its effects on patient outcomes

The problem should be studied to examine and determine the relationship that exists between the nurses, the long working hours, and their patients’ treatment outcomes. While many sanatoriums presume the nursing staff should extra shifts over and over again, they fail to recognize that the healthcare employees need time off to recuperate and re-energize away from the hospital environment (Stimpfel et al., 2012). Working overtime without proper breaking periods in between could prove physically and emotionally demanding to a person. The long stressing hours can lead to an increase in accident occurrences in the hospital as well as burnouts among the employees. Therefore, a study should be conducted to help improve on adjusting the extra working shifts for nurses who could ensure that the caregivers are allowed enough time for rest well before assuming their duties.

Reference

Stimpfel, A.W., Sloane, D.M., & Aiken, L.H. (2012). The longer the shifts for hospital nurses, the higher the levels of burnout and patient dissatisfaction. Health Affairs (Project Hope), 31(11), 2501-2509.