Do Other Professionals Skip Restroom Breaks And Meals?

Nurses routinely skip restroom breaks and lunch periods, especially if they are employed in bedside settings. However, no reasonable person can work nonstop, day after day, year after year without feeling some type of resentment, bitterness, and burnout. To optimally take care of patients, we need to take care of ourselves first. It is time to start taking our breaks. Nurses Announcements Archive Article

I sometimes believe that inpatient bedside nursing is intertwined in a bizarre professional culture where the skipping of bathroom breaks and lunch periods is not only common, but occasionally encouraged by our peers and the powers that be.

Can you name any other professionals who systematically place the needs of their clients above their own?

Countless nursing staff members who work in inpatient bedside settings such as hospitals and nursing homes frequently bypass the breaks to which they are legally entitled. According to a study that was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2005), nurses are regularly sacrificing their breaks and meal periods to provide patient care. Although many of us already knew that that this practice was going on for quite some time, it does not bode very well for our personal health or job satisfaction.

After all, who wants to work anywhere from eight to twelve hours in a physically demanding role without any breaks?

I can see why numerous nurses explore career options away from the bedside.

According to Fink (2010), while the research confirms what nurses have known for years-few nurses get full breaks; long shifts + heavy responsibility + lack of breaks = fatigue and increased potential for mistakes-part of the blame may lie with nurses themselves. Some nurses forgo their breaks, especially in facilities with toxic work environments, because their callous coworkers or unsympathetic supervisors will endlessly gripe about having to cover an additional patient load during the time away from the floor. Other nurses skip breaks because they feel they might fall further behind with their tasks if they sit down for an uninterrupted lunch or leave the unit to use the restroom.

And even though healthcare facilities must legally pay nonexempt employees who work through unpaid meal periods, the managerial staff at some of these workplaces may subtly discourage nurses from completing 'no lunch' paperwork by taking disciplinary action against workers who submit a large number of these forms.

It is clear that both bedside nurses and the powers that be share some blame for this problem. Facilities need to do their part by encouraging staff to take all legally entitled breaks while taking steps to ease the intense workload.

The workload of bedside nurses can be made more manageable through safe staffing ratios, more streamlined charting, less redundant paperwork, and supportive management. Nurses must do their part by taking all breaks to which they are entitled and willingly covering the patient load of coworkers who wish to leave the floor for a break. Some hospitals employ part-time relief nurses who are on the unit solely to cover for breaks.

In summary, we must take care of our bodies and minds by taking breaks. No reasonable person can work nonstop day after day, year after year without feeling some type of resentment and burnout. To optimally take care of patients, we need to take care of ourselves first.

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Specializes in Transitional Nursing.

We don't get but one 30 minute meal breaks by law. We're not allowed to leave the property unless we're on lunch. We an have 2 10 minute breaks while working if business allows. Yeah ok. I find that mostly I forget to pee because I'm too busy. Suddenly it'll hit me like ohhh right gotta do that. No big deal

"No day but today"

I remember taking less than 10 bathroom breaks while in nursing school.

Uh, did you count them? I have no idea how many times I went to the bathroom in nursing school. It had no bearing on my GPA or my performance as a nurse. What do you mean by the post?

Specializes in Hospice.

I generally get my lunch and about half the time i get my breaks... I work on one of the busiest floors in the hospital and most of us get our lunches...most days. I think its a mindset. there is always something more to do.....when i first started i didn't get breaks most days and rarely lunch... but now that i am effecient i'm also reasonable...that peeing and eating are a necessary thing for me. If a patient gets d/c right at 11 am that means i won't get lunch because I'm going to have to d/c them and immediately get assiged a new pt. But if they are d/c after my break i can do all the d/c foot work in the am eat a lunch and then d/c them and get my next patient.... win/win for everyone. I have found wh en i get d/c orders i 'feel' out the patient...if they really want to go home right away i try to get them out but most people i find don't want to be pushed out, they want to eat lunch, have help gettng cleaned up one last time, really review the instructions. I fit my lunch in as a priority too, i can get everything done and then not have to apologize to my patients about a growly stomach.

There are a couple of reasons for this .MOst of them having to do with poor staffing. (it takes me more than 2 mins to pee if i count the walk there and back and handwashing. and if tss is a risk that week i need more time) oh well!. some shifts it is non stop. paging drs, have to wait for them to cAll, q1 even q30min orders and this is med surg. if you even plan accordingly the 30mins you have allocated for your lunch someone will start having chest pain, bp 75/35, rrt, blood sugar 56 and no dextrose order and npo. it all happens often enough. YOu can only go when there is someone to cover for you, we are short to begin with, so if the other nurses are too busy you can't go whether you have time or not. I want a break to go buy my lunch and eat in peace! not a fake meal bar !!!! if someone has to wait for meds so be it, if that decreases press gainey scores so be it. but in reality i dont opperate that way. there is rarely a nurse able to help, and some do not wAnt to. if i am eating and an aide tells me an iv pump is beeping, i better get up and fix it or come back to an occluded site and pt needing to be stuck again! then if i try to go back to eating someone will ring for meds, alarms will go off and time for vitals, wound checks, cbi bag replacement etc. and it is med surg not a field in iraq or inner city police department. it happens because we are short to begin with to increase profits. but that is the white (magnet) elephant in the room

I remember taking less than 10 bathroom breaks while in nursing school.

That's less than one bathroom break a month. The hydrogen in the water molecules in your bladder must have been fusing into helium.

I try to take pee breaks at least once a day. The phone often rings while I'm in the bathroom or on a lunch break. One time it rang three different times when I was trying get to pee. I answered it each time and then finally got to do my other "business."
god i hope we never get those phones. please god no. but icu and a few others already have them . at least an overhead page isn't done as often and the families or pts cant do it
Why? Because until that corporate entity is actually feeling the financial impact of those errors, they don't care.

Things don't change until someone dies. AND their family sues. And even then, they'll just give us another form to fill out, as that will fix the problem.

I'm wondering if anyone on this forum is or has been employed in a Magnet Hospital. I hear they're supposed to be nurse-friendly. Anyone out there have experience in one of them? Is it any better? Do nurses feel empowered to effect change?

Bahaha! Magnet just gives you more crap to do and less time to pee or eat lunch. Because you have to get points for your career ladder and attend all those meetings that are supposed to be "shared governance" but they don't actually let you change anything that would make the nurses' lives easier.

I had to go back and re-read the article that initiated this thread. It really covers it all in my opinion. I agree that taking breaks and not working through unpaid lunches is a shared responsiblity of staff and management. It benefits everyone in the long run, for the reasons outlined in the article. To NOT do it is a disservice to everyone as well. As Wooh puts it (above)...."Ethics are so annoying!:)" How true!

I don't think it requires anything real dramatic, though, just maybe making an effort every day to try to get that break and lunch and to help another nurse with hers or his. Or to ask the manager to see if they'd be willing to support more efforts in that direction because it's the right thing to do.

I remember being warned by a close friend and counselor, when I entered my first career as a social worker, that being a professional "caretaker" can be very unhealthy if you are not setting firm boundaries for your own physical and mental health. I have tried to live by that ethic, so the opposite now seems very unnatural and unhealthy, both physically and emotionally. I really, really wanted to be a hospital acute care nurse, and hope someday to succeed in that. But, especially after reading the experiences shared here, I'm not so sure I'll be able to fit. I know I'll have to get tougher, thicker skin, and more courage, too. Thanks everyone for your thoughtful, funny, wicked, heartfelt posts.

Specializes in Case mgmt., rehab, (CRRN), LTC & psych.

I have included a concept referred to as the 'unwritten social contract' below, and this seems to be lost on many healthcare workers. The basic idea is that each person must meet his or her own basic needs before attempting to do anything for others.

Each individual in a society has an underlying obligation, to the best of his ability, and before all else, to take care of his own basic needs, both immediate and for the foreseeable future, before attending to the needs of others.

This might sound selfish and blunt, but you as an individual should make sure your needs are being met first. Yes, you come first. Patients come and go, get admitted and discharged, but the nurse has an entire lifetime to deal with his or her body. Take care of it by taking your meal periods and bathroom breaks.

I stopped answering my phone when I am in the bathroom. Our phones roll over to the nurses station, and I go straight there to find out who was calling. We are allowed to let our phones roll over if our hands are busy, ha ha, a nurses hands are busy all day.

Specializes in (Nursing Support) Psych and rehab.

Lol, gray's anatomy just came to mind. In one episode some of them put diapers on in the operating room. Bathroom problem solved! No, not really. In a situation of emergency, our fight flight mode takes over, but in non emergency situations denying yourself a bathroom break is completely unhealthy.

Specializes in neuro/ortho med surge 4.
A very wise nursing instructor would always end a long day of clinical by telling her students "Take good care of yourself, because noone will do it for you." And she's right. As I was a floor nurse for a long time, I was just as guilty as the next, going 8-16 hrs on the job without eating (I have kidney problems so I have always been pretty good about the pee breaks). I was down to a shocking 95 lbs on my 5'4 frame, sick all the time, and eventually my periods stopped. I had to quit my job at this specific facility, because on top of it all, it was extremely high stress and I was stuck doing at least 2 mandations a week.It took my health to finally put my foot down and start taking 15 minutes to eat.

Crazy work this nursing. The instructor became an instructor due to the working conditions I bet. Not to say she didn't love teaching but most nurses I work with are pursuing higher education to get away from the hectic and stressful bedside.