How to Adjust to Night Shift Work

¶ … Shift Work in the Hospital The shift work is a term used to define the situation where the employees work in recurring periods with each team of employees coming in doing the same work as the previous team that might have left. It is a mode that is adopted in most work places that cannot have their doors closed to the public as a matter of necessity due to the services that they provide.

Such establishments like the police, hospitals, army establishments and such critical institutions have a long history of operating round the clock hence necessitating the sift work arrangements so that the clients are well served. However, with continued globalization, many other forms of businesses have shifted to the 24 hours operations and in that case the shift work schedules.

The pressure that has been increasing by the time on most businesses to deliver more goods and services to a wider clientele that seems to be having lesser time to wait as was before has contributed immensely to the increased shift work across the U.S. And even other developed nations. However, with the increasing fame of the shift work to boost the capacity to meet demand there are consequences that come alongside it.

There are challenges that the organizations, management, employees and even the government agencies face in line with these shift. Of particular interest in this paper is the hospital institutions and the challenges that the shift schedule faces here and the consequences and the possible solutions that could be implemented to solve the challenge. Griffin M.R., (2015) indicates that the shift work can come with serious health conditions like the cardiovascular disease, diabetes and even obesity. It is also associated with ulcers, stomach problems and depression.

The diseases could come as a result of the change in lifestyle occasioned by the shifts and yet others could be due to our biology. When an individual is used to exercising daily and the suddenly he has to change that due to the work schedule that starts at 5pm through the night, he will definitely miss the exercises hence exposing him to the cardiovascular diseases. The individual will also be prone to resorting to junk food in the middle of the night hence possible predisposition to diabetes.

The hospital shifts will also lead to depression since the individual will be alone and lonely most of the time in the health facility. This shift will also dissociate him from the family members and the social circle he was used to. Instead he will be sending the better time of his night going round to attend to sick people and sitting in his office when there are no patients who need attention.

When the individual goes home in the morning, he will want to catch some sleep due to night fatigue. This is a redundant schedule that can make one get into depression as he will be having no social life. In other industries where many people work in a shift and workmates have the chance to talk to each other provides and environment that depression is less likely to set in, unlike the hospital environment.

Another predominate problem that shift work in a hospital can bring is the shift word disorder (SWD), this is described as a state where your body's internal sleep-wake clock is not in agreement or in tandem with your work schedule. It is experienced by the individual who works outside traditional working hours and struggles to stay awake at work, despite having had enough sleep during the day. It is estimated that up to 45% of the night shift workers suffer from this disorder (Cephalon Inc. 2014).

The other dangerous challenge that a nurse working night shift may have is loss of attention since the brain will be fighting fatigue and sleep at the same time. This will lead the nurse to lose attention on the activities that they are supposed to be carrying out and even may not hear the patients calling out for their attention. The night shifts also make the nurses in the night shift lose concentration on whet they are doing.

In this case they may overlook some critical medication procedure, miss some drug or some essential signs that a patient may show, often with deadly consequences. The work in a hospital needs full concentration since each patient is unique, with unique medication to be administered and unique reaction to be observed and managed. The shift work is also known to compromise the reaction time of the staff at the hospital.

Patients may display signs or some reactions that the nurse may notice but due to lack of sleep or the nigh shift fatigue, he may take time before he reacts and manages the patient as is required. In order to deal with the challenges that shift work brings to the hospital, the management or the individual responsible for slotting in the shifts needs to have a clockwise shift as opposed to anti-clockwise one. Day shift to evening shift to night.