shift work - Minority Nurse

4 Key Work Benefits Modern Healthcare Workers Should Demand

by Derek Jones | May 14, 2021 | Blog, Nursing Careers | 0 comments

If the throes of recent health emergencies have taught the healthcare industry anything, it’s that healthcare workers deserve better. According to a recently published Shift Work Report, 96% of workers, including healthcare workers, agree that shift workers deserve more respect. Whether working on the frontlines, in emergency departments, or attending to patients in a family care clinic, nurses deserve more.

As a modern healthcare worker, you should fight for the benefits that you deserve. And as an employer, you should know what your employees want and need in a workplace in order to reduce turnover. Continue reading for four key work benefits that nurses should demand.

In Demand: The Current Climate of Nursing

Although nurses are indispensable, they are often unsupported. Unfortunately, the issue of undervaluation for nurses is worse for women and, even more so, women of color. Nearly 1.7 million female healthcare workers live below the poverty line with their children.

Many nurses continue to make minimum wage, even though their jobs require a high skill set and at least some education. This is not the only problem that nurses face today. With employers discouraging unionization, non-unionized nurses are missing out on an extra $128 per week.

In addition, nurses experience dangerous working conditions with little protection. Exposure to chemicals and illnesses due to a lack of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) causes millions of healthcare workers to get sick or injured on the job.

Other than pay and safety, hospital healthcare workers endure inflexible schedules and long working hours that lead to quick burnout, whereas nurses that don’t work in emergency departments are facing job insecurity due to COVID-19.

The culmination of these issues have made one thing especially clear: it is time for a change in the way that nurses are treated.

On-Demand: 4 Value Drivers for Nurses

Beyond the bare minimum of a livable wage and accommodating work arrangements, it’s important that administrators implement key changes to incentivize productivity and loyalty.

Here are four value drivers for nurses, and how employers can implement better practices.

1. Moral Support and Job Security

Many say that nursing is a great career to go into because there are always jobs available. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected 175,900 nursing jobs to open each year. However, according to the report cited in the intro of this article, 69% of shift workers—including healthcare workers—are concerned about job security even with high growth projections.

With so much insecurity in the healthcare industry, employers should work hard to ensure that their nursing staff feel supported. Here are ways in which employers can do this:

Empower staff by allowing them to swap shifts.
Provide clear expectations about hours and job tasks.
Make hours visible to staff so that they know what to expect on payday.

Although employers can’t control job security industry-wide, they can control whether or not they are morally supporting their nurses.

2. A Safe and Healthy Workplace: Fair Working Conditions

COVID-19 has brought about new concerns in healthcare workplace safety. Nurses are forced to take the brunt of health hazards as they care for the most vulnerable patients, with or without proper PPE. Although it may seem hopeless, nurses can fight for stronger ethics and workplace safety.

Here are ways that employers can make a safer environment for nurses:

Double-checking employee health through temperature screenings and symptom logs.
Use videos to share new safety protocols.
Implement touchless clock-in features, such as apps or keycards.
Ensure that employees know about fair working regulations.

It’s important for nurses to follow CDC and WHO recommendations. More importantly, employers should optimize PPE according to CDC guidelines, so that nurses don’t have to work without it.

3. Flexible Schedules

Many nurses love shift work, with 66% of workers seeing flexible scheduling as the top benefit of their job. There are some types of nursing that offer more flexibility than others. For example, telehealth nursing offers excellent schedule flexibility due to the work-from-home aspect.

Schedule flexibility is especially important to mothers and caregivers. In fact, 40% of nurses are mothers with children under the age of 18. Without schedule flexibility, nurses may have a difficult time securing childcare or working around school schedules.

4. Communication and Care

Above all, employers need to prioritize communication with their nurses and working towards their benefit. Healthcare shift workers should feel comfortable talking with their employers about issues like safety, pay, scheduling and benefits. Here is how employers can develop soft skills and make nurses a priority:

Build schedules based on employee needs.
Ensure that payroll is accurate and on time.
Connect with your team to encourage a more friendly work atmosphere.
Provide opportunities for promotions and raises.

Essential Workers Deserve More

Nursing and healthcare facility staff have quite literally saved the day in the past year. Their tireless efforts have mitigated major risks and helped families through a global pandemic. Many of them had more to do than ever before which caused more stress at work and at home too.

It’s now more important than ever to care for nurses as employees. It will result in higher productivity, low turnover and burnout rates, an overall higher degree of job satisfaction and, in the end, better patient outcomes. All it takes is a few changes in the workplace to make this happen.

Getting Your Zzz’s: Sleeping and Shift Work

by Michele Wojciechowski | Dec 3, 2020 | Blog, Nurse Health, Nursing Careers | 0 comments

Shift work — so many nurses do it or have done it at least once in their careers. While patients definitely need care around the clock in certain settings, the nurses who care for them also need sleep.

According to Amy Witkoski Stimpfel, PhD, RN, an Assistant Professor at the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, “Shift work—particularly nights and evenings—misalign our body’s natural circadian rhythms. Simply put, as human beings we were not made to be awake late at night or very early in the morning,” she explains. “Thus, there is a cascading effect on this circadian misalignment on the rest of our body’s functioning.”

The biggest problem with this is that nurses must be able to provide safe care and going without sleep can be problematic. “Obviously sleep disruption is one of the biggest and most dangerous consequences of circadian misalignment caused by shift work. Being sleep deprived is also especially difficult because we are not good judges of how impaired our functioning is when we are sleep deprived. So, as nurses it can be very dangerous to practice when sleep deprived,” Witkoski Stimpfel says.

She cites the National Academy of Medicine, which recommends that nurses not work more than 12 hours every 24-hour period or 60 hours per week. There is also evidence that shows nurses should work a maximum of two to three shifts in a row.

Witkoski Stimpfel gives the following tips for nurse on how to best perform at their jobs when working overnight shift work:

Achieve enough adequate sleep during off shifts
Judicious use of caffeine
Use blue-blocking sunglasses on the way home after a night shift
Use blue-blocking apps/filters on smartphones and other electronic devices before getting sleep
Limit voluntary overtime hours
Have a bedtime routine that doesn’t include alcohol, nicotine, or other drugs
The bedtime routine can include taking a bath, listening to music, medication, talking with a spouse, friend, or family member—these will all help the body to shut down for rest.

Know that you can make mistakes when working nightshifts. “One of the biggest mistakes nurses can make when working night shift is to not sleep before a shift. Most studies on this topic indicate a small portion of nurses simply do not sleep before going into night shift, which is very dangerous,” says Witkoski Stimpfel. “Using melatonin or other sleeping aids should only be used under a provider’s guidance.”

If you have to switch from dayshift to nightshift in one week, Witkowski Stimpfel suggests the following, “It will be challenging to get “good” sleep when working one off night shifts, which is why that kind of scheduling should be avoided. If it happens occasionally, the nurse should try to get a nap before the night shift and definitely sleep as much as possible following the night shift. Using caffeine at the beginning of the shift and taking a walk or going up a few flights of stairs around 4 a.m. can help with alertness during the shift. If possible, using public transportation or having a friend or family member drive the nurse home after the shift could help to avoid drowsy driving,” she says.

Remember that these present, strange times we’re in have caused a lot of additional stress on everyone, especially health care workers. So it’s important to get the sleep you need. “The COVID-19 pandemic has placed additional and unprecedented stress on nurses, often resulting in disrupted sleep,” states Witkoski Stimpfel. “It is really important to reach out for help, whether it is therapy or counseling, meditation, a consultation with a sleep medicine physician, etc. Sleep is crucial for functioning across the board, both mentally and physically.”