Ask a nurse which parts of her body are most abused and she’ll likely give you three: the stomach, bladder and legs. This is most especially true for nurses who work inpatient bedside settings, where they have multiple tasks that demand their attention simultaneously or immediately. Throw all these together and it can even result to a headache.
Growling stomach
Working long shifts in a unit which is often understaffed and where patients can be quite a handful, it is no wonder nurses are known to skip meals. And when you’re on the floor for 12 hours at a stretch or sometimes even longer, how can nurses’ stomachs not be growling in protest?
Even those who eat heartily before a shift will begin to feel hunger pangs five or six hours down the line. So going without sustenance for extended periods of time on a daily basis will definitely take its toll on the stomach.
Bladder ready to burst
Foregoing bathroom breaks means
…show more content…
Aching legs
And then there are the legs. More often than not, nurses are on their feet while on shift. The few times they get to sit down for some paperwork are often too short before they are up and running again. Walking back and forth down a long hospital corridor day in, day out is extremely taxing but part of the job. And the legs and feet, which bear a person’s weight, is most abused.
Varicose veins are nurses’ enemies. Cramping, too, can result from too much stress on the legs. If a nurse stops and leans on a wall briefly, it’s not just to catch their breath but also to take some pressure off their weary legs and feet.
The constant walking around is part and parcel of healthcare services. Hopefully, nurses get to put their feet up once they get home for some relief. But the missed meals and skipped bathroom breaks can be
The idea of shift work is a common one, but for nurses this is not a simple changing of staff during a certain time, change of shift signifies a time of purposeful communication between nurses and patients, in order to promote patient safety and best practices (Caruso, 2007). During this time, there is the possibility for this critical opportunity to relay important information to become disorganized by extraneous information, rather than concentrating on the needs of the patient (Sullivan, 2010). Often the patient is left out of the conversation, and is not a part of the process. Patients and families can play an important role in making sure these transitions in care are safe and effective (AHRQ, 2013).
Caused by the constant demands of work and lack of taking breaks, burnout is a challenge in itself and can get even worse if gone untreated. More and more nurses have begun to feel the effects of burnout, raising a dire concern that healthcare workers while taking care of others, must also remember to care for themselves which can, unfortunately, go neglected when the work is so heavily focused on saving the lives of
Due to hospital care reaching an all-time high in America, we need nurses now more than ever before. Currently in America, we have an issue with nurses having too many paperwork to fill out. In the article “We Need More Nurses” by Alexandra Robbins argues we need more nurses in the hospital. Nursing shortage has been a common issue throughout the world. Because of this issue others are being affected in many different ways.
Nurses play an essential role in the healthcare industry. The nurse workforce is made up of licensed nurses: registered nurses (RNs), licensed vocational nurses (LVNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs), along with nurse aides. Registered nurses are responsible for assessments of patients’ needs, development of care plans, medication administration, and treatments, while licensed vocational nurses perform specific care under the delegation of the registered nurses and supervisions. Nursing aides perform activities of daily living (unskilled attention) to the patient. Adequate nursing staffing is essential to both patient care and outcomes, also to the retention of nurses while inadequate staffing creates problems for both the patients and
After a 12 hour shift, nurses are tired and just wants to give report and go home. According to Horrigan, Lightfoot, Larivière, and Jacklin (2013), working long hours can cause nurse illness and injury, fatigue and safety problems, feelings of burnout, and depression. This causes the nurses to get discouraged from having to say longer than necessary checking the same patients at the end of each shift. The result of this is neglecting to comply with the policy and a failure in the skin assessment sign-off. Using incrementalism as a policy making mode, skin assessment sign-off at shift change can be successful.
Nurses feel obligated to report to work despite illness to prevent coworkers from suffering through poor staffing ratios, 3. A nurse reporting to work despite illness assumes that their presenteeism leads to better patient outcomes than their absenteeism would, 4. When nurses are faced with the conflicting demands of caring for patients and meeting targets, the potential to compromise integrity arises, 5. When working in a culture that promotes presenteeism while also placing high demands on nurses with high staffing ratios, nursing fatigue becomes prominent. Although the concepts are intangible, the impact on the
This is important evidence because it gives us conditions and results of what can happen if patients get lower quality care. Patients’ are not having enough time getting checked up by a nurse, and nurses would miss some diagnostics. Patients are getting sick because of the poor care they are receiving from nurses. The care patients can get is affected by a nurse shortage, “Nursing workload definitely affects the time that a nurse can allot to various tasks. Under a heavy workload, nurses may not have sufficient time to perform tasks that can have a direct effect on patient safety.
“Better Nurse Staffing and Nurse Work Environments Associated with Increased Survival of In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Patients” states that, “In 2012, registered nurses had 11,610 incidents of MSDs (musculoskeletal disorder), resulting in a median rate of eight days away from work. Among all healthcare practitioner and technical occupations, there were 65,050 nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses that required a median of seven days away from work.” While we are unable to attribute every workplace related injury to stress, burnout, and poor work conditions, it is easy to correlate extreme fatigue with decrease in concentration and increase in avoidable
Although, they are doing what they love to do, they lack sleep because of their long hours. Which then can possibly lead to depression. Depression effects their body’s physical health as well as their mental health. Physically, depression effects the nurse because it zaps their energy which causes them to not want to verbally communicate with the patient. Mentally, depression can make one suicidal, it could also cause the nurse to want to do self-harm and take pills due to the access they have with pills.
Short staffing is one of the many challenges nurses encounter in the work environment. The impacts can be detrimental primarily to the patient’s outcome. To examine the effects of short staffing, research was conducted on 36,539 hospital inpatients to evaluate the amount of those exposed to an understaffed shift and how many patient outcomes resulted in a NSO (Twigg, Gelder, & Myers, 2015). NSO’s are nurse sensitive outcomes based on the nursing care provided to the patient. Patients exposed to short staffing had an increase of greater than one chance of NSO’s compared to patients not exposed (Twigg et al., 2015).
An ordinary day of a nurse is filled with enduring hours of physical, mental, and emotional work. A nurse always has to be on their feet and ready to go. They must be ready face the obstacles placed upon them, and make life and death decisions in the snap of a finger. This is not an easy job by any means, and can leave you run-down at the end of the day. It may feel as though the day is a never-ending cycle, but it is so worth the health and happiness of others in
Nurses fatigue is growing problem nurse face each day in the healthcare environment, and he can be caused by long hours, sleep deprivation, and possibly by accepting extra assignments can be dangerous for both nurses and patient. These inadequacies can result in major implications for the health and safety of registered nurses and can compromise patient care which can lead to fatalities. (American Nurses Association, 2014). In my experience, being fatigued from working much 12-hour shifts consecutively was very difficult as I felt extremely tired, resulting in lack of focus, missing important details during the handing over the process with impaired cognitive functioning. This I found was detrimental to the patients and myself as it impedes quality and has a deleterious effect on patient safety.
However, according to Ignatavicus and Workman (2013) the floor nurse role is to monitor pain, vitals, level of consciousness, gastrointestinal system, urinary system, and motor abilities (p.
Just like a saw needs to stop being used in order to be sharpened, a nurse needs time off to recuperate; it’s as simple as that (Covey, 1989). It is important not to burn the candle at both ends, working more than the designated shifts and longer than 12 hours should be avoided. An example used regarding medication errors and working too many hours involves a nurse working a double shift on a pediatric oncology unit didn’t correctly prime an IV line and caused cardiac arrest in a patient (Kelley, 2004). Although nurses work three days a week, their hours remain the same as other full time employees that work the typical 5 day schedule. A nurse’s time off should be valued because they are the last line for patient care, they are the ones administering the medication the doctor prescribes and the pharmacy makes (Kelley, 2004).
Through intuition, superior nurses save lives and prevent further illness. Physical Endurance Maintaining physical health is a vital part of enduring the stressful and high-energy demands of the nursing profession. Nurses lift heavy patients, move weighty medical equipment, and may spend 12 hours or more on their feet during a shift. Accomplished nurses observe a healthy diet and perform regular exercise.