New Study Links Less Collaboration with Working Overtime
This past spring, Chenjuan Ma, PhD, and Amy Witkoski Stimpfel, PhD, RN, both assistant professors at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, published a study in the Journal of Nursing Administration that examined whether working overtime can negatively influence how nurses collaborate with other nurses and physicians. In their study “The Association Between Nurse Shift Patterns and Nurse-Nurse and Nurse Physician Collaboration in Acute Care Hospital Units,” the researchers concluded that one third of all nurses work longer than they are normally scheduled, and as a result, their ability to collaborate decreases.
Drs. Ma and Stimpfel took time to talk about the study and its results.
Why did you decide to do this study in the first place?
Dr. Stimpfel: There has been increasing interest in how to manage shift work and overtime hours for nurses due to the impact of fatigue on patient safety and quality. Collaboration has been identified as being a factor that is influential in patient safety and quality as well. We know that our ability to work effectively and regulate emotions—key to collaboration—diminishes with increasing wakefulness and fatigue. We could not find literature to support the relationship between work hours/overtime and collaboration in the nursing literature, which is why we conducted this study.
It’s interesting that nurses who work regular shifts of 11.88 hours or longer regular shifts of 12.17 hours don’t have a decrease in collaboration. But if nurses working that first shift of 11.88 hours had to work a shift of 12.17 hours—which would mean overtime—they would have a decrease in collaboration. Did you discover why this happens?
Dr. Stimpfel: Our data did not detail why working overtime resulted in decreased collaboration. However, the conceptual model in our study helps guide our hypothesis about why this relationship occurs. As nurses work longer shifts, often unexpectedly, this increases wakefulness. Prolonged wakefulness can result in less ability to make decisions and regulate emotions, which may lead to greater difficulties in collaboration. As suggested by our findings, this is more likely to happen when nurses have to unexpectedly work longer than scheduled.
Does any amount of overtime cause problems with collaboration between nurses and other health care professionals?
Dr. Ma: With our current study design (i.e., observational, cross-sectional design), we were not able to detect the minimum amount required to lead to changes in collaboration. However, as the very first study of its kind, our study provided empirical evidence of a significant association between work hours/overtime and collaboration. Our current study suggested that one hour of overtime was associated with 0.17 decrease on the RN-RN scale. In other words, a 0.17 decrease from mean score of the RN-RN scale suggest that a unit’s rank on the RN-RN score would drop from 50th percentile to approximately 30th percentile.
Why is collaboration so important?
Dr. Ma: Collaboration is critical for quality care and patient safety. When working collaboratively, different parties in the patient-care team—including nurses and physicians—will share objectives, responsibility, decision making, and power to achieve patient care goals.
Previous studies have shown that patients receive superior care and have better outcomes in hospitals where nurses collaborate well with other health care providers. Without good collaboration among health care providers, quality patient care may be compromised.
Were you surprised by the results of your research?
Dr. Ma: Not really. Maybe the high number of nurses—one in three nurses—reported working longer than scheduled.
Do you have any suggestions for what should be done so that collaboration doesn’t diminish?
Dr. Ma: One highlight of our findings is the significant association between longer overtime and decreased collaboration. This finding suggests that one strategy to improve collaboration is to minimize nurse overtime as much as possible by a variety of means, better shift scheduling, and predicting and ensuring adequate staffing, etc.
Is there anything regarding this research that you think is important for readers to know?
Dr. Stimpfel: Our findings have broad implications, not just for nurses, but also for other health care providers who are at risk for shift work-related fatigue. Effective teamwork and collaboration are critical to patient outcomes, thus, managing shift work and overtime hours are important for the entire heath care team.
