الفهرس 
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Abstract
Summary
There is no doubt that the hospitals must be staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year to provide even basic health care. The presence of well rested nurses is important to perform their duties and give high quality patient care. On the other hand, long working hours (night shift) can have much physical, psychological, health, social effects on the worker and decreased performance. This will reflect on the quality of patient care (Landsbergis, 2003).
The present study aimed to determine the nurses problems related to night shift at main Assuit University Hospital. The study included 208 staff nurses working at main Assuit University Hospital classified as follows:
General intensive care unit (26), post operative intensive care unit (15), coronary care unit (22), chest intensive care unit (21), tropical intensive care unit (13), neurology intensive care unit (17), internal medicine (32) and general surgery (62).
A structured interview questionnaire for nurses consisted of two parts was used:
The first part included personal and occupational data about the study subjects as gender, age, marital status, years of experience, unit of work, and educational qualification.
The second part is a sheet developed by the reearcher based on the related studies of Abdo (1987), Madide (2003), and Abdalkader, and Hayajneh (2008), to determine nurses problems related to night shift work. It includes questions related to sleep aspects (4items) work performance (7items), psychological aspects (4items), social aspects (11 items) and health aspects (6items).
The study questions are close ended, open ended and some of them using Likert scale.
Methods:
- An official permission was obtained from hospital directors at Assiut University Hospitals to collect necessary data and explaining the aims of the study.
- Oral consent from participating nurses was taken.
- Pilot study was fulfilled to test the questionnaire’s clarity, feasibility, applicability and necessary modifications were done from prior to final application. It was carried out on twenty nurses from the selected units. Staff nurses who were included in the pilot study were excluded from the study sample.
- The researcher collected data by making personal interview with nurses from the selected units and explained the aims of the study. Each subject consumed about 15-20 minutes. All relative data were collected in three months.
The results of the present study revealed that:
- Most of the study sample were female, aged more than 20 to less than 30 years old, are married, had experience ranged between five to less than ten years.
- Approximately fifty percent of the study subjects work at the night shift every three weeks and most of them don’t prefer it, moreover the majority of the study subject seen the work at night shift was strenuous.
- Above half of the studied nurses’ agree that the night shift work needs more energy to perform their duties, become more tired, and reported that the difficult hours at night shift work was from 2Am to 5Am.
- (82.1%) of the studied nurses’ agree that sometimes resources are unavailable or scarce at night shift.
- (78.9%, 87.5% and 91.4%) of the studied nurses’ agree that the night shift work disturbs their social life, increases family conflict, and the educational level of their children affected by their working at night shift work
- Night shift work affects their health as a high percentage of them complains about backache (83.5%), feet ailments (75.3%), persistent tiredness 66.7%), sustained to occupational injury (76.9%), and muscular strain (61.2%).
- There are high statistical significant difference between marital status of the study subjects and their feeling about night shift work (p=0.003). This might be because the majority of them hate night shift work, work continuity 7 days every three weeks and have children in nursery or school age.
The study recommended that:
• Increasing numbers of nurses especially in ICU units by redistributions of nurses man powers in the hospital units to decrease exhaustion due to work over load.
• Limiting the number of night shifts work days from 7 nights to 3 nights per month.