A study to Assess the Knowledge and Attitude on ill Health of Night Shift Nurses Working at a selected health facility, Bangalore

Nursing is the heartbeat of health care and Nurses have been called “Angels in comfortable shoes”. Over the years, the nursing field has grown in scope and complexity as well as size, and nurses now make up the largest workforce within the healthcare industry, as the field grows to 0.9 million nurses only in India.^3,4 Nurses as a health care provider work hours of the day. For most nurses changes that are inherent to night shifts are unwelcome imposition on a normal life, yet one they have no control over, leading to physical health problems that effects the life of an individual.⁵Nurses are obliged to work during the day and during the night to cater for the needs of sick people.

While Intensive care nurses were vulnerable to a stressful environment because of the complex nature of patient’s health problems that requiring an extensive use of very sophisticated technology.⁷if a patient is unconscious, nurses will try to turn him every two hours or so to prevent him from getting bed sores.

Nurses often work 12 hours shifts, the amount of lifting in one shift adds up a lot, and the job could be very hard to manage physically.⁸Night shift nurses are responsible for patient care with little support in a difficult working environment under conditions of fatigue and other hardships directly related to working at night.⁹ Nurses, irrespective of their shift, are under constant stress from staff shortages, aging workforce, more complex patient needs, continued technological progress and exponential advances in knowledge.¹⁰

Background:  Night shift nurses are responsible for patient care with little support in a difficult working environment under conditions of fatigue and other hardships directly related to working at night.Intensive care nurses were more vulnerable to a stressful environment because of the complex nature of patient’s health problems.

Objectives:

1. To assess the knowledge and attitude scores on ill health of night-shift Nurses.
2. To determine the association between knowledge and attitude scores of ill health with selected demographic variables of the subjects.
3. To find the correlation between knowledge and attitude scores of ill health among subjects.

Method: Descriptivedesignwithcross-sectionalapproachwasusedforthisstudyto assessthe knowledge and attitude on ill health, of night shift nurses. Purposivesampling wasusedtocollectdatafrom60ICUnurses.Data wascollectedfortheperiodof15days. Structured questionnaire and attitude scaleswereusedastoolstoassessthe knowledge and attitude on ill health. Thedataobtainedwereanalyzedin terms ofobjectives and itwas calculated and tabulated.

Results:knowledge level of respondents on ill health of night shift 28.30% had inadequate knowledge, 46.70%had moderate knowledge and 25.05% of nurses had adequate knowledge regarding ill health of night shift.