Summary Of The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours

If any person went to any hospital, they would see plenty of nurses, doctors, nurse aides, and so many other employees, working around the clock, and taking care of patients. Next, they would probably notice a strange beeping sound, and then see a light above a patient room shining. In fact, they would probably see many of those lights. Then a nurse will run out of one room, and fly into the next. That nurse, depending on the time of day, is probably already eight hours into a twelve hour shift. She only got to eat half of her lunch, she hasn’t been able to use the bathroom for a few hours, and her favorite patient lost their fight that morning and so her mascara that she threw on that morning, haphazardly while still half asleep, is no longer on her eyelashes, but smeared onto her dark eye bags. Also, the only other nurse on her unit called in sick this morning, and no one could come in to cover. In the book The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives, Theresa Brown, BSN, RN, the author of the book and a clinical nurse in Pittsburg, describes a twelve hour shift at the hospital where she
It does a facility no good to hire enough nurses to work the floor if all of those nurses are going to leave their positions within a year of being hired. Too often, nurses get burnt out quickly from the stress of the job, the long hours, and the work load from having inadequate staffing. Bob Dent, a writer for Nursing Economic$, wrote his article, “Nine Principles for Improved Nurse Staffing” about how to include nurses into the solution and make sure that they are satisfied. One of his steps is to include nurses in the staffing process by creating a Nurse Staffing Advisory Counsel (NSAC) that has frontline nurses working on it. It also has members of management and infection control on the counsel so that there is plenty of representation (Dent