If nurses are really ‘at breaking point’, they should stop working 12-hour shifts

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.