Rotating Night Shifts Erode Long-Term Health of Nurses

Ten years or more of such shift work decreased the odds of healthy aging by 20%.

Shift work is a staple of hospital nursing, and several large studies have found that rotating night shifts, in particular, are associated with increased mortality. Now, an international group of researchers has found evidence of significant harm to nurses’ overall health from rotating night shifts.

Detrimental effects on healthy aging.

Published in the May issue of JAMA Network Open, the study by Shi and colleagues found that 10 or more years of night shift work—defined as at least three nights per month in addition to day and evening shifts—conferred 20% decreased odds of healthy aging. The study’s end point for healthy aging was reaching age 70 without major chronic disease, physical limitations, memory impairment, and mental health issues. The association between a history of night shift work and deteriorated health was unchanged when age, body mass index, or lifestyle factors were considered. Although the mechanisms underlying these effects are unknown, the authors pointed to several possibilities, including altered circadian rhythms since they are important to metabolic regulation and disruptions may impair physical health.

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2022-08-04T09:23:34-04:00August 4th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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What Can We Do About Addressing Nurse Exhaustion?

“Even when good workplace policies and support exist, without enough staff to meet essential patient needs, nurse fatigue cannot be properly addressed.”

Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash

When I was working as an ED nurse, if a colleague was out sick we’d invariably be asked to work a double shift—so, 16 hours instead of our usual eight-hour shift. It wasn’t bad as a one-time occurrence. But I can’t imagine how nurses have managed working five or more days of 12-hour shifts in a row, or even more, during the surges of Covid-19 patients needing hospitalization in various parts of this country. It’s no wonder there are so many stories and reports of nurses leaving the acute care setting.

While the obvious answer is that there needs to be more staff to share the work, not only to improve staff well-being but also to make care safer—and this is not a COVID-induced phenomena; we’ve known this for years thanks to research by Linda Aiken and others—getting that to happen has largely been unsuccessful.

Hospitals staff conservatively as a policy, causing many to be short-staffed on an almost ongoing basis. This makes for a stressful work environment that in turn causes nurses to leave, thus further exacerbating […]

2021-12-03T09:51:29-05:00December 3rd, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Sleepless Nurses

“If I couldn’t even figure out what goes into my lunch box, how could I possibly have multitasked . . . on a busy unit?”

Awake for 40 hours.

Photo by Jeff Greenberg. The ImageWorks.

I recently had the disorienting experience of being awake for 40 hours. This had to do with a family member’s interminable emergency department visit, a 3 a.m. car breakdown, and a post-ED MRI and medical visit.

I’ve never been up for 40 hours in my life. I didn’t pull “all-nighters” in school before exams, and never worked longer than a double eight–hour shift. Partying the night away wasn’t in my DNA. So this experience was strange and new, and something I pondered over for days afterward.

An ‘otherworldly’ state.

By the time I’d been up for 24 hours straight, I was operating at a level about two beats behind everyone around me. Physically, I felt a little off-balance, as though I might fall if I didn’t step carefully. My brain seemed mired in muck, and I found myself trying to recall what I knew about depleting bodily stores of ATP. Preparing to return to work around hour 26, I stared into my lunch box. I couldn’t remember what food I was supposed […]

2018-05-21T08:29:35-04:00May 21st, 2018|Nursing|4 Comments
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Napping on the Night Shift: What a Pilot Study Revealed

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Table 1. Guidelines for Hospital Nurses on Implementing Naps on the Night Shift (click to enlarge)Nurses who work the night shift often struggle with high levels of sleepiness. But while onsite napping is effectively used to counter worker fatigue in other safety-sensitive industries, the practice has yet to win wide acceptance in nursing.

Curious about why this is so, nurse researchers Jeanne Geiger-Brown and colleagues recently conducted a pilot study. They report their findings in this month’s CE–Original Research feature, “Napping on the Night Shift: A Two-Hospital Implementation Project” (for some night shift napping ground rules, see, at right, Table 1: Guidelines for Hospital Nurses on Implementing Naps on the Night Shift—click table to enlarge).

Here’s an overview:

Purpose: To assess the barriers to successful implementation of night-shift naps and to describe the nap experiences of night-shift nurses who took naps.

Methods: In this two-hospital pilot implementation project, napping on the night shift was offered to six nursing units. Unit nurse managers’ approval was sought, and further explanation was given to a unit’s staff nurses. A nap experience form, which included the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale, was used to assess pre-nap sleepiness level, nap duration and perceived sleep experience, post-nap sleep inertia, and the perceived helpfulness of the nap. Nurse managers and staff nurses were also interviewed at the end of the three-month study period.

Results: Successful implementation occurred on only one of the six units, with partial success seen on […]

2016-11-21T13:01:12-05:00May 16th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research, patient safety|3 Comments
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Nurses, Exercise, Time: Hitting a Nerve

Flickr creative commons/ Richard Masoner Flickr creative commons/ Richard Masoner

Hitting a Nerve. I received several recent emails about an editorial I wrote in the April issue of AJN, in which I discussed nurses’ health practices, including exercise, in conjunction with one of our feature articles, “Original Research: An Investigation into the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Practices of RNs.”

The authors found that, for study participants,

“physical activity and stress management scores were low for the entire group of RNs.”

Drawing a connection between these findings and recent research by Letvak and colleagues suggesting an association between nurses’ health and job performance, I wrote, “If the nurse caring for you or your loved one is suffering from fatigue and stress, she or he may be more apt to make an error or to sustain a workplace injury.”

Judging from the emails I received, I hit a chord. The writers stressed the difficulty of working full time and, in many cases, caring for a family as well. Often, they said, they had little energy left over for themselves. One writer, though, did say that my editorial was the ‘kick’ she needed to get back to walking! […]

2017-06-28T14:34:26-04:00April 28th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, personal health practices|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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