During my nurse residency, it was mentioned that our health system and in general across the board, 12 hour shifts are under scrutiny. This is due to staff fatigue, errors, and continuity in patient care.
It was said that in the not-too-distant future 12 hour shifts will be going away in our health system. In bedside nursing, the four days off to recuperate from the circus that is my unit, I can't imagine being there 5 days a week!
I am looking to get out of bedside nursing anyway, but I was wondering if anyone else has heard talk of this!
I would only worry about it if I preferred 12 hour shifts and they said they were taking them away from the place where I work. As for the entire system going away, not tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow.
We actually fought against switching to 12s. While it would be nice to work less days/week (the most we work right now is 8shifts/2 weeks), we do not have enough staff to cover the inevitable holes, and a 12 hour hole is a lot harder to cover than an 8 hour hole. What I mean is that our core staffing calls for 5-6 nurses, but because of census issues, we've been using 7-8 nurses per shift. It's doable to come in 4 hours early or stay 4 hours late when we're scheduled 8s, but if it were 12s, that would be a nightmare.
We're a regional (but small) level 3 NICU, that is responsible for babies born within a 3-hour radius--which means that if a baby who needs NICU services within 3 hours travel distance from us, we are responsible for staffing the two RNs to pick up the kid.
We don't have anywhere NEAR enough contingency staff.
Specializes in orthopedic/trauma, Informatics, diabetes.
We were just talking about this over the weekend. A veteran nurse said that when she started, she did 2-12s and 2-8s. I personally love the 12s. I work 3 days and I drive about an hour each way to work. 5 days at rush hour times would make my days 12 hours anyway. I used to work at a LTC rehab that were 8s, I worked 3-11-LOVE that shift but never saw my kids for dinner. That job, I drove even further
I love what I have now. If it weren't such a scheduling nightmare, giving the option of 8s is a good idea, but I don't see things changing where I am
I wish we had a real management type chime in here. I had to do an exercise in my BSN management course and it showed that the costs were higher for the unit using 12hr shifts and most nurses at 0.9 FTE or less. I won't argue the point much cause the course was a couple of years ago and I don't remember the exact details. I think the point of the exercise at the time was to discuss how even though it cost more, it attracted more nurses so with the nursing shortage (love those textbooks that stay oh so up to date), it was needed to keep the nurse vacancy rate under control.
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caliotter3
38,333 Posts
I would only worry about it if I preferred 12 hour shifts and they said they were taking them away from the place where I work. As for the entire system going away, not tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow.