The Effect of 12 Hour Shift on Registered Nurses - Essay Example

It is indispensable to consider the consequence of the 12-hour shift for nurses on all the stakeholders involved who are the nurses, and patients, as well as the hospital management’s reason for implementing this structure.

            This needs assessment will benefit the recommendation to adopt or reject the 12-hour shift for the registered nursing community depending on their sentiments and responses to the questions posed to them through a professionally-written survey. The needs assessment in this case is very much dependent on the available resources that entail people, money, and time as factors of consideration. The targeted population in this particular needs assessment is the nursing community. In looking at the effect of the 12-hour shift on registered nurses, the questions to be responded to will allude to pertinent issues. These are related to the needs such as patient safety in view of the effects of longer working hours, the hospital’s reason for implementing the 12-hour shift, and the effects on the registered nurses in particular (Rogers & Hwang et al., 2011).     

            Using a needs assessment survey is an appropriate approach to this problem because the need to be assessed is tri-faceted and should be approached from this angle by involving all stakeholders in the intended survey. Stimpfel and Sloane et al. (2012) assert that these extended work shifts that range from 12 hours or more have become common in the field of registered nurses and are popular with hospital staff nurses. Little is known concerning the effects of such extended hours on patient care or the registered nurses’ well-being (Stimpfel & Aiken, 2013). It is from this point of view that the survey approach comes in handy as a way of aggregating the experiences and responses, especially from nurses and patients. In their survey, which featured nurses from four states, results indicated that more than 80% of the nurses were willing to conform to their hospital’s scheduling practices, but patients’ dissatisfaction with the care received increased with the increase in the number of nurses working extended shifts. They outline that the recommended shift duration according to RN standard guidelines is eight hours.   

Question 2: Describe your proposed data collection methods and evaluate any challenges you might encounter.

            The most appropriate data collection method for assessing this need that pertains to the effect of a 12-hour shift on registered nurses will be a professionally-written needs assessment survey (Commission For Health Improvement, 2010). This is a tri-faceted issue; the survey will have four parts printed on one sheet to save on printing costs and each section will be appropriately headed for the right respondents. The first section will require the registered nurse's response, followed by a section for the patients, then a hospital management section, and finally a section to be filled in by the surveyor commenting on the collected data. Expected challenges as uniform with this data collection method include ignorance and arrogance on the respondent’s part. The patients might be ignorant of the need for assessment and decline to take part by showing indifference. The registered nurses might view it as a waste of time and burden for no reason probably causes by familiarity with many surveys that make no difference or plain arrogance citing waste of their valuable time for “more important” things. The hospital management may decline to give me a chance to query them by claiming to be busy and always on the move frustrating the survey effort.