Effect of Nurse's Overtime on Job-Related Errors and Adverse Effects

Effect of nurse's overtime on job-related errors and adverse effects
Institution
Date
Introduction
One of the biggest problems in nursing today concerns work-related errors. Most of these errors gave been blamed on fatigue and long working hours. Resident nurse duty hours have always brought up a question of patient safety and value of training. This research studied how registered nurses’ longer working duration directly related to critical events and mishaps like needlestick injuries, work-oriented injuries, nosocomial infections, patient fall injury and medication errors.
Background of the study
Nurses’ working hours has elicited interest from various groups and the body that is responsible for giving accreditation to graduate medical education introduced boundaries on resident duty hours in a bid to ensure patient safety is improved. Whereas no federal law restricts mandatory overtime, fifteen states have legislations that prohibit mandatory overtime. There is general assumption that extended working hours leads to nurses’ fatigue thereby impacting patients negatively. The study borrows from forestry and motor vehicle operation where adverse effects of fatigue have been witnessed. The federal government moved in to regulate driving hours with the belief that sleep deprivation lowers alert and performance levels. In healthcare, long shifts with little or partial sleep affect alertness and performance. Overtime has always been used in healthcare to bridge the gap on the shortage of employees, influxes of patients or even both. Studies on effects of overtime have shown attention lapse occurs twice at night as compared to during the day (Lockley et al., 2004). Even though talks to regulate compulsory overtime for nurses, have been ongoing, very few researchers have been able to link length of nurse's shift and adverse events in patient care. However, in other studies, some hospital registered decreased mortality rate as a result of overtime (Olds, & Clarke, 2010). Various researches have linked over time with injuries related to workplace. Musculoskeletal injury and needle stick injuries are believed to be closely connected with overtime (Clarke, 2007). The purpose of this secondary data is to explore the relationship between work-hours and adverse events that are experienced by both patients and healthcare employees.
Method of study
The study was conducted by analyzing secondary data of unspecified surveys from 1999. It uses unsystematic fifty percent samples of registered nurses who were interviewed in Pennsylvania. 52 % of the contacted nurses returned the questionnaire. Issues addressed in the questionnaire include characteristics of employment, environment of work, job specific moods, the nature of shifts run and demographic essentials (Olds, & Clarke, 2010). Hospitals, where at least ten nurses returned the questionnaire, were given priority to ensure reliability. Nurses responsible for over twenty patients and those with only one patient were excluded from the survey as that meant they were not giving direct care to patients. The study used a sample of 11,516 registered nurses from 188 Pennsylvania hospitals.
The measurement of variables included nursing cha...