24hr shifts?

[RiderRN81]

Hi, an am currently I am currently interviewing with a flight ambulance company who works 2 - -24hr shifts weekly. I am looking for advice fTom people who have worked 24hr shifts, pros and cons. Is this common?

[RosesrReder, BSN, MSN, RN]

I personally love the 24's. I work ground ambulance mostly interfacilities. I am the only nurse on shift so am always open for calls from BLS, ALS and CCT. We usually stay busy but I find that having 5 days off a week is much easier on my body than working 3-4 12's. You get 8hrs overtime a week and it adds up at the end.

I try to sleep well the night before and if there is any downtime, I try to shut my eyes and nap. I stop all coffee at around 1700 and just drink warm teas the rest of the night.

When I do a stand up 24hr shift, I feel like death the next morning but I find that if I nap 2-3 hrs and don't waste the rest of the day, I am refreshed yet able to get back on track on sleeping nights.

I don't think I will ever go back to 12's lol. I find that I can also pick up a 12hr OT shift and still be golden the rest of the week as far as endurance etc.

Good luck to you

[mlowens]

I love 24s but you have to discipline yourself to eat right, and rest. I also is possible like to work some tai chi, or Qi gong meditation into my down time. Helps in several levels.

[akulahawkRN, ADN, RN, EMT-P]

Back when I was working as a Paramedic, I worked 24's fairly often. I actually like them if I am able to get at least some sleep during the shift. I don't sleep well while at work but a little does refresh the mind a bit. After about 2000, I would stop drinking coffee and just get water if I felt thirsty. At that time I also developed a pretty high tolerance for caffeine so I could drink the stuff relatively late at night if need be. Where I worked, we rarely got a lot of calls during the night so that wasn't too bad. For a while I actually worked a 36 hour shift and that usually went fine unless we had to work all night without rest.

You do have to be ready for the possibility of having to be up and working the entire time you're there though, because it's possible that you could end up being that busy. If at all possible, don't schedule yourself for back to back shifts because that can become very tiring and you could end up making mistakes because your brain is in a fog. When you get home, take a nap for about a full rem cycle and then go about your normal day and then sleep normally that night.

The best part of working two 24 hour shifts each week is that if you do it right, your schedule could be on/off/on/off/off/off/off... so you get 4 straight days with family every week.

Would I work a 24 as a floor nurse? Not unless I was forced to. In the transport environment? Sure. As long as I have an opportunity to sleep/nap as needed between calls, I'm good to go.

Just make sure that you eat right and get some exercise. What's tempting about ground transport is that you might just be tempted to get some fast food... and that will wreak havoc with your weight control plans as will the stress of working a 24 if you're fairly busy and can't sleep much if at all.

[crossfitRN]

I agree with what everyone else has said.

It sucks if you are getting hammered through the 24hrs. I stay after and sleep on the couch if I have this kind of shift so I don't fall asleep driving back home.

I LOVE ground transport. No BS hospital stuff (short CNAs, nurses, etc). A little more autonomy. If I have someone really sick and need help, I call for a BLS rig to give me a hand. They don't question it.

You have built in overtime from two, 24h shifts a week. That's when you can rake in the money.

Sometimes you get sick of doing BLS calls.

Its good to be able to think outside of the box in this line of work....adapt and invent on the go sometimes. This works well with my personality because I also hate being micro-managed.

Every outfit is different, but managing vented pts is scary for some nurses. Sometimes if they are on a ton of drips and have a bunch of stuff hooked up to them it might make you nervous (transport imposes risks for extubatiin, etc, because you might be sloshing around in the back of an ambulance, depending on your driver).

Managing sedation is important, too.

I love this and generally feel better with my current schedule rather than working three to four 12s on a hospital floor.

Meal planning is a must to manage crappy eating habits typical of ambulance people (I do ground transport).

Another thing: pager anxiety. Sometimes if.its quiet, you lay there (I nap during the day in case I have a night from hell) and can't sleep because you expect the pager to go off, so even if your shift is easy, you sometimes won't sleep well, LOL!

Nothing beats this schedule, though.

[paramedic-RN]

Common? It's status quo. Personally I have weird sleep habits, I sleep 10-12 hours a night (I know crazy right) and I'm an unusually heavy sleeper I regularly sleep through alarms, sleep walk too anyway it took me a looooong time to adjust to 24's but I eventually did however since I do the ambulance PRN when I'm haven't worked a 24 in a few months because I was just picking up 12's or something that first 24 hits you hard until you adjust. I don't see any pro's personally I think it's unsafe.

[AZQuik]

24's are fine so long as you can get a few naps. Working 12's I pound caffeine. When I worked 24's I rarely drank it so I could nap.

BSN GCU 2014. ED Residency

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