In healthcare sector, evidence-based practice is currently one of the most growing applications and trend in nursing informatics (Kaminski, 2014). Its application can be witnesses in various areas such as nursing education, administration, research, and practice. The main aim of the evidence-based practice is to promote the patient care by deciding on the most suitable nursing practice as well as increase the numbers of solution for health providers to choose from in giving care to patient. The overarching goal of evidence-based practices is to transfer health care choices, actions, and decisions to more of research, theoretically-based and scientific level (Kaminski, 2014). An information technology invention has been shown to be the tremendous in advancing evidenced-based practice and has been upholding the positive trend in the healthcare industry.
The evidence has shown that the length of shifts, the overall hours and working overtime hours have a significant relationship to errors and absenteeism rate (Susan, 2011). The prevalence of 12-hour shift in nursing and the practice of not getting on time significantly escalated the risk of making errors. When nurses work for 12 hours they become fatigue that makes them prone to make procedural errors and frequent mistakes. Patients who are cared for by nurses who have worked for long hours have a high probability of readmission after discharge (Susan, 2011). This is raising questions on the quality of discharge planning given to a patient. Furthermore, the fatigue that is associated with 12-huor shifts has been shown to be responsible for increase in absenteeism cases i.e. the repercussion is self-perpetuating in the sense that long shift hours causes fatigue which in turn result to absenteeism that demand for overtime hours to fill unexpected absences, thus, increasing shift length (Susan, 2011). The 12-hour shift is not only causing patients to suffer but it also causes nurses to suffer beyond the reported fatigue (Stimpfe et al., 2012). The study reported that nurses who are working for 12 hours or more per day have increased odds of musculoskeletal disorders. 12 hours shifts have been reported to cause drowsy driving and motor vehicle collision. Evidence-based scientific research on nursing practice is recommending important issues to be put into practice in order to reduce the risks to patients as well as to nurses. It is recommending that the 12-hour shifts should be decreased so as to create a positive outcome-driven and a safe environment (Susan, 2011). The healthcare facility should investigate factors causing the nurses to stay late and then come up with actionable plans that will ensure nurses are leaving on time at the end of a shift. Lastly, the healthcare sector should decrease the use of overtime hours and if the overtime is the only answer to shortages of healthcare providers, the overtime should be distributed across all nurses in order to prevent the issue of only one member always willing to do overtime.
Health information technology offers support to the evidence-based practice in several ways. It can assist family nurse professionals to locate, manage and utilize the information they are requiring in their healthcare practice. Additionally, it decreases the time of finding information to be used in making decisions at the healthcare facility. It also assists nursing research that can unravel discoveries to update and improve nursing practice. It presents several ways for gathering information, storage, analyzing and processing data. It helps in implementing and disseminating research findings through databases, thus, conveying the best nursing practices which subsequently improve safety and quality of healthcare.
References
Kaminski, J. (2014). Technique: The Revealing of Nursing Informatics: Exploring the Field Retrieved from http://www.nursing-informatics.com/revealing/technique.html
Stimpfe, A., Sloane, D., & Aiken, L. (2012). The Longer The Shifts For Hospital Nurses, The Higher The Levels Of Burnout And Patient Dissatisfaction. Retrieved from http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/WorkplaceSafety/Healthy-Nurse/Longer-Shifts-For-Hospital-Nurses-Higher-Levels-Of-Burnout-And-Patient-Dissatisfaction.pdf
Susan, R. (2011). Evidence-Based Nursing: 10 ways to practice evidence-based staffing and scheduling. Retrieved from http://www.nursingcenter.com/journalarticle?Article_ID=1239110
