Nurses and Working Overtime
Humans strive to balance between leisure and work; thus, they are not fascinated with overtime. The arrangement is associated with various limitations. Nurses offer their services in a demanding setting. Overstretching their mode of working through either mandatory or voluntary overtime is merely exposing them to increased workload. General knowledge about overtime is that it upsets a person’s proper role performance. Not only does it harm an individual’s health, but it also contributes to stress and burnout. Within the medical field, it matters to protect clinical professionals from fatigue and turnover intent. Nurses working overtime create job dissatisfaction and prompts adverse patient outcomes, which eventually limits the delivery of quality care.
A balance between personal life and work performance safeguards excellent outcomes, and a deviation from such a practice has negative consequences. The undesirable staffing of nurses reduces service quality delivery. A study to examine the effect of overtime laws on quality among registered, permanent, and contract nurses used a stochastic staffing model, which comprises operational flexibility. The finding was that the law created a deficiency in nurse staffing decisions .1 overtime and adverse nurse outcomes are related. Researches have reported a statistically significant association between overtime and patients’ deaths and nurses’ pressures. 2 Limitation in positive individual’s life and clinical practitioner’s task execution implies job dissatisfaction.
Nurses working overtime means inadequacy in safeguarding positive patient outcomes and progressive quality health care. Not allowing medical professionals to perform their mandate efficiently compromises a patient’s safety. An exploration done on the impact of regulation on the number of nursing working hours indicated that mandatory overtime caused adverse patient occurrences.3. Shortages in the number of nurses should not be an avenue to exhaust the existing ones. Resolving this problem in the short term would oblige an overtime plan based on contract hours as a commitment to mitigating the deficiency.4 It is a practical solution for guaranteeing staffing flexibility. Therefore, it could enhance the relevance of working overtime only when the program does not limit personal performance level.
Nurses provide essential services in a demanding health care environment; hence, they should not be overworked. While overtime may seem to cause adverse effects, it warrants a program that assists in making these professionals comfortable while providing their services outside the regular hours. Making the most appropriate staffing decisions is essential. It could entail creating an avenue for contracting nursing services. Accordingly, it necessitates an effective policy that balances nurses’ working hours to reduce job dissatisfaction and adverse patient outcomes for excellent service delivery.
Footnotes
- Susan Feng Lu and Lauren Xiaoyuan Lu, “Do Mandatory Overtime Laws Improve Quality? Staffing Decisions and Operational Flexibility of Nursing Homes,” Management Science 63, no. 11 (2017): 6.
- Cathleen Wheatley, “Nursing Overtime: Should It be Regulated?” Nursing Economics 35, no. 4 (2017): 214.
- Wheatley, “Nursing Overtime:” 217.
- Lu S. and Lu L., “Do Mandatory Overtime Laws Improve Quality?”, 6.
Bibliography
Lu, Susan Feng, and Lauren Xiaoyuan Lu. “Do Mandatory Overtime Laws Improve Quality? Staffing Decisions and Operational Flexibility of Nursing Homes.” Management Science 63, no. 11 (2017): 1-42.
Wheatley, Cathleen. “Nursing Overtime: Should It be Regulated?” Nursing Economics 35, no. 4 (2017): 213-217.