Summary: Nurse Fatigue

The article highlights issues and potential outcomes due to nurses working long hours; nurse fatigue is a critical topic that needs to be addressed within the medical profession. Most hospitals assign nurses to 12-hours shifts, and the average of four to five patient’s per nurse. The long shifts are extremely tiring for most nurses, and furthermore, can be detrimental to their health, which ultimately puts the patient at risk. As a result, nurses may not extend the therapeutic communication as expected and could make dangerous, and sometimes fatal mistakes. Nurses may also find themselves calling out from work, or constantly changing jobs creating high turnover rates within hospital systems.
The dilemma of maintaining a 12-hour shift focuses
However, the question remains what about the safety of our patients? Extending work hours can result in risk for medication errors, which can be detrimental. According to the article, a nurse at St. Mary Hospital accidently gave a patient the wrong medication, and it unfortunately, resulted in costing the patient’s life (Nurse Fatigue, 2015). This error resulted in the hospital’s risk management team implementing a policy that limits the number of hours that a nurse can work, as well as safety methods for administering medications. Also, they moved forward in providing the nursing staff with sleeping quarters where nurses were able to take a nap if they felt it necessary.
Nurse Fatigue and Medication Errors
An 8-month old baby was being treated in a children hospital’s Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) following cardiac complications due to a congenital
If the nurse is feeling the effects of fatigue and is not getting enough sleep because the long, demanding hours and workload, an error is bound to happen. In this case, if a nurse is experiencing fatigue she must think of the consequences of his or her actions. According to Kant, the Categorical Imperative is supposed to provide a way for us to evaluate moral actions and to make moral judgments. So, a nurse should know their obligations and duties, as well as understanding their physical limitations. If a nurse is fatigued, and we were to evaluate their moral actions based on Kant’s theory, it would be understood that the nurse is displaying unethical actions and is doing harm to the patient. If a medication error were to take place because a nurse was fatigued, it could have fatal repercussions. Nurse fatigue does not only impact the patient, but it also impacts the nurse as well. There is a significant correlation between the lack of sleep, especially within 24 hours before work, and the risk of making an error while caring for patients. If a nurse is working a consecutive 12-hour shift, three days a week, they are going to be sleep deprived. It is stated that, “Some studies are comparing impairment to blood alcohol content, suggesting that a nurse awake for 19 hours is the same as having a blood alcohol content of 0.05%." (Nurse Fatigue,