Nursing and Shift Work

Nursing and Shift Work

Nursing and Shift Work

Introduction

Shift work is a truth for about 25% of North America employed population. Interest in the effect of shift work on people; have developed because many experts have blamed rotating shifts for human error connected to a number of accidents and catastrophes related to disturbance of circadian rhythms which result in an increased risk of accidents and injury. (Coffey, Skipper, & Jung, 1998). The international council of nursing (ICN) recognizes that many health care providers' services are accessible on twenty-four hour basis, making shift work a necessity, at the same time ICN is very concerned that shift work may have a negative impact on the individual's health, ability to function, thus affecting the services provided. Nurses as health care providers are obliged to work during the day and during the night to cater for the needs of sick people. While Intensive care nurses were vulnerable to a stressful environment because of the complex nature of patient's health problems that requiring an extensive use of very sophisticated technology. Furthermore, few researchers' studies the effect of night on critical care nurses for example Mathew and Campbell (1990) stated that Nurses turnover is expensive. It affects the security and effectiveness of service in Intensive Care Units. And they hypothesized that frequent night duty is a major factor influencing turnover therefore they conduct a study on thirty (30) nurses, who choose to leave intensive care unit within last eight month, The results of the study support the hypothesis and they found that 50% of the staff left intensive care unit, because of general dissatisfaction with a variety of aspects of their job, specifically night duty.

Previous Research

literature has devoted much attention to the effect of night shift on the entire living sphere of mankind, particularly nursing as profession had a lot of studies describe the effect of their working against the physiological nature of the human being which affects their health, psychology, and social life, this physiological nature created by Allah which is circadian rhythm, confirmation to this, Allah says in the holly Quran "and made the night as a covering, and made the day as means of subsistence". Circadian tempo is determined by nucleus suprachiasmaticus in the hypothalamus. This structure regulates the physiology and psychology functions of the body such as temperature. Reaching its maximum at five pm and its minimum at five am. This basic principle underlying the rhythm variation is catabolism and readiness for action during the day, and anabolism and rest during the night. (Akerstedt, 1996). According to Pheasant, 1999, the word circadian comes from the Latin" circa dies" which means "about a day". Circadian rhythms are partly driven by the internal body clocks and partly synchronized to external world by cues known as zeitgebers (German: ziet, time; geber, giver). These rhythms are coordinated to allow for high activity during the day and low activity at night. Normally the body benefits cues from its methods and from the environment such as timepiece time, ...