We previously studied trends in median nurse organizational tenure across the United States (U.S.) between March 2021 and March 2022.1 We wanted to further understand whether there are differences in how day and night shifts are staffed based on the country where nurses work. Night shifts have previously been reported as having fewer and newer staff as well as reduced access to management and services.2
We studied nearly 52 million nursing shifts across the U.S, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Lebanon, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, and Denmark. We compared the proportion of shifts covered by new nurses—those with less than one year of tenure at the organization—during day and night shifts.
We found that in all countries but the U.S., a smaller portion of night shifts are covered by new nurses compared to day shifts, as seen in Figure 1. Additionally, the U.S. has higher rates of new nurses in each of the shifts than most other countries.
These findings highlight the importance of support structures across all shifts, in particular those with low nursing tenure. AdventHealth, for instance, developed and trained EHR experts to provide peer-to-peer support, which ultimately led to reduced documentation time and nurse turnover. Learn more about their approach on EpicShare.
