Staffing and Nursing Fatigue

[TheMrsRN]

Does anyone know of any journal articles or research studies on nursing fatigue? Thanks!

ETA: This isn't homework. I am not a student. I am looking for credible studies that I can use to help implement evidence based staffing protocols for my facility.

Also, if you don't know of any, but work at a facility that has staffing policies to prevent nursing fatigue, what are they and how are they working at your hospital?

[pajoopie1]

@emergency

i'm totally feeling you! It's RIDICULOUS that if there is a call out we staff the floor inappropriately. We still get in trouble if we don't dot every i and cross every t. Seriously? We worked (wo)man down for 3 of the last 12 hour shifts. Just be happy we didn't kill anyone!

This very reason it was has me looking to take a break from the bedside. There needs to be a big enough float pool to cover the call outs. Especially if you are in a big hospital. We have 800 beds so it wouldn't be hard to predict call outs for each shift and find a way to have enough nurses waiting in the wings to pick up any slack.

And the bean counters should realize that if they staff the floor better, they won't continue to have to replace nurses like me! It takes $60,000 to recruit a nurse. That would be a whole lot of float nurses!

[coolpeach]

And frankly all I have heard lately is "Make the patient's happy". I don't have time to make the patients happy. I am just barely have time to keep them alive. If the hospitals are so concerned with "Patient satisfaction" they should try putting their money where their mouths are and add a few nurses and techs.

If we discharge a couple of patients and feel our heads are above water they will call someone out, and redistribute those patients so we are drowning again.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

i have to do a lot of info-searching for my work. here are a few ideas.

you really can find good stuff from reputable journals in google scholar; i use it often for work. try searching for "sleep hygiene," too, and "nursing errors overtime," and that sort of phrasing.

i know wikipedia is not considered a reputable source, but if you look there, many of its articles have bibliographies which include papers from reputable journals, and you can get those.

on both of these, you can usually get the abstracts for free; sometimes the abstract gives you enough info to get started. there are often related articles cited on the same page, and you can follow up on those.

sometimes the full text of a paper is free, although often the full text is a charge.

you can often get access to databases through your public library. try for pubmed. ask the medical librarian in your hospital, too.

the nih is tax supported and has a lot of good sources. go to their home page and hit search...you can get lost in there for days and come up c all sorts of good stuff.

many states with state-funded medical schools allow access to the medical library to anyone with an md or rn license. worth asking.

many colleges have database access and they will let an alumnus/alumna use them. my university gives me access to a huge number of sources just for remembering my old student id and a corny password of their divising, and i haven't set foot on campus for decades.