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Night Shift Nurses

739 Words3 Pages

Working for long hours at night is a common practice for the nurses worldwide which has a negative impact on their performance. They can experience sleepiness drowsiness, lack of energy, and exhaustion. All of this can eventually result in poor thinking abilities and lethargy. Consequence of sleep deprivations can affect not only the nurses’ performance and health, but also affect the patients they deal with. This white paper discusses the prevalence, potential causes and consequences of this predicament along with global examples which indicate the dilemma of night shift nurses. Recommendations for solving this issue on individual and organizational level have also been given.

Night Shift work is considered to be an important part of providing …show more content…

They can also become more irritable. They can have poor health and rate of mortality also increases. A study on the sleep-deprived elder women revealed that they have less adverse health effects as compared to younger women. This means according to this study, greater age can be a positive factor as it leads to resistance to the health impacts of night time working (Mn, 2013).
The incidents of Fatigue in night shift nurses can be worsened in the night shift nurses that don’t have a holiday in a week and they don’t have a day off during a work. This means that working for more than 4 consecutive 12-hour shifts in a week can lead to problem of excessive fatigue due to prolonger working hours. This can also means that fatigue accumulated in the bodies of these night Shift nurses will take a longer time to go away and their recovery rime s also prolonged. A research done by Folkard and Tucker showed that the fatigue accumulated in the body due to prolonged working hours and successive work shifts might leads to higher rates of accident while driving. This study revealed that the risk rises by 6 percent on the second night working shift; and this risk reaches to 36 percent higher on the 4h day of working. Thus, night shift nurses who work on the successive night shifts has also been studied by Hanecke and colleagues which supports these …show more content…

Their body balance is disturbed and not getting sufficient sleep affects the working of their normal body functions. Metabolism can be affected and they can also experience sudden loss/increase of appetite. An evident dose-dependent relationship between duration of sleep and obesity has been noted, which shows that not getting enough sleep can lead to obesity. Night shift nurses can thus experience a plethora of health issues. According to the previous research finding, night shift nurses can experience change in their Glucose tolerance due to sleep restriction and can even lead to diabetes in female night shift nurses. Apart from that, the night shift nurses can also experience mood changes and other body problems due to the changes in their body hormones. Hormones that are linked with appetite like cortisol, and thyrotropin can also drop or rise due to sleep deprivation(Rogers,

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