Fatigue in the workplace has always been a major issue for the healthcare sector as it affects a team’s morale, motivation, and patient outcomes. For this reason, the implementation of naps varying in time according to the shift duration may be a beneficial initiative in terms of increasing productivity and job satisfaction. Hence, the purpose of the initiative is to reduce the fatigue among the nursing staff, thus increasing job satisfaction, decreasing stress rates and conflicts within the team, and securing quality care and better patient outcomes. The target population of the initiative comprises registered nurses who work shifts lasting at least 12 hours.
Health care as a safety-sensitive industry cannot ignore employment issues that may explicitly affect the safety of both the staff and patients. Scholarly research demonstrates that the implementation of scheduled naps significantly improves the work quality and alertness among nurses compared to the employees who do not have scheduled naps (Han et al., 2021). Moreover, the benefits of improved fatigue rates include lower irritability, which means a lower probability of workplace conflicts with patients’ service complaints. To successfully implement the initiative, it is of paramount importance to secure interprofessional collaboration in terms of workload distribution during the scheduled shifts. This can be achieved by creating a CRM system for the nap schedules for the nurses to be aware of the colleagues who should be covered during 30-minute nap breaks.
The present initiative does not require any additional cost allocation. On the contrary, it has been proved that taking 30-minute naps results in financial gains due to a productivity increase (Bessone et al., 2021). The basis on which the initiative will be evaluated will include the frequency of medical errors, interpersonal conflicts in the workplace, and self-reporting the general feelings of drowsiness and fatigue both before and after the implementation of scheduled 30-minute maps during 12-hour RN shifts.
References
Bessone, P., Rao, G., Schilbach, F., Schofield, H., & Toma, M. (2021). The economic consequences of increasing sleep among the urban poor. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136(3), 1887-1941. Web.
Han, K., Hwang, H., Lim, E., Jung, M., Lee, J., Lee, S., Kim, Y. H., Choi-Kwon, S., & Baek, H. (2021). Scheduled naps improve drowsiness and quality of nursing care among 12-hour shift nurses. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(3), 891. Web.