Nurse Fatigue and Shift Length: A Pilot Study

Increasing emphasis on patient quality and concerns about the impact of health care worker fatigue has stimulated efforts for leaders to address patient quality and caregiver satisfaction. Shift length has been associated with nurse fatigue and has become a growing concern in the United States with the routine shift length of 12 hours. In this project, shift lengths from 12 hours to 8 hours for a 4-week period to evaluate fatigue levels associated with 12-hour and 8-hour shifts. Lessons learned from this experience: nurses are agreeable to try a proposed change, numerous ideas should be tried to develop additional innovative solutions to the issue of nurse fatigue, and nurses may not want to work 5 days per week.