Scarcely a month goes by, or so it seems, without one or other representative body of the medical profession complaining about how dangerously overworked and generally unappreciated its members are. The latest is the Royal College of Nursing — still smarting, perhaps, from the Francis report into the fatal negligence at Stafford Hospital — which found that nurses today are frequently stressed out and ‘forced to choose between the health of their patients and their own’. Forgive me, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
The preamble notes that morale has deteriorated since a similar RCN survey eight years ago published under the same self-fulfilling title, At Breaking Point. What the survey failed to spell out, however — and would be equally hard to find in any recent consideration of nurses’ grievances — is that the worst of the long hours are self-imposed, and take the form of the 12-hour shift.
Some shifts are even longer. There are web forums where you find nurses talking about working up to 14 hours on the trot, – and not because their ‘bully’ of a boss has demanded unpaid overtime, but because this is their shift, and they like it. They choose to work like this.
According to the Nursing Times, almost half of all NHS nurses now work shifts of 12 hours or more. These long shifts began, like so much, in the United States in the 1970s, and soon made their inevitable advance over here. In the US, the new shift patterns reflected difficulties in staffing night shifts. Here, it was always a tool for efficiency — or, to put it another way, for reducing numbers. But it rapidly became that holy grail of management: an economy measure so popular that it became a recruitment draw.
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