The videos feature nurses greeting the camera before and after their shifts. Most of the transformations betray varying degrees of exhaustion, disheveledness and dejection when 12 hours are done, although a select few workers seem as chirpy as when they walked in.
A video posted on October 14 has racked up 9.3 million views. Though it shows five nurses, one of them attracted more attention when she strayed from the script.
“Hi, my name is Ally and this is me after my 12-hour shift with Celsius and Adderall,” said the nurse.
Ally quickly became the focus of viewers who flocked to the comments section, theorizing on her well-being.
“Ally looked dead inside before the shift even started,” said one commenter.
“[Ally] looks like she needs a nurse,” wrote another viewer.
Others said they were “very concerned” for the nurse and asked if she was “okay.”
Although shifts of 12 hours or longer have become standard at hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, they are still debated within the medical community. In the 1970s, the 12-hour shift was lauded as an intervention to reduce staffing costs, organize care more efficiently, increase the quality of care and improve nurse recruitment, according to a 2022 discussion paper in Human Resources For Health.
However, the researchers found that these value propositions largely fell short. The available evidence did not point to improved efficiency, with nurses possibly reducing their pace to save energy or manage until the end of their shifts. Consecutive 12-hour shifts were associated with increased fatigue and reduced sleep times, adversely affecting nurses’ performance and patient safety.
Improved recruitment has also been hard to demonstrate. Quantitative evidence found that units with 12-hour shifts reported a lower nurse vacancy rate but a higher turnover rate, according to the researchers. Still, long shifts may play a crucial role in attracting nurses who look for flexibility, even if they are subsequently driven out of the job by burnout.
In March 2022, a three-year study by researchers at Washington State University found that 12-hour shifts weakened the quality of a nurse’s communication with patients. The shifts can also impair a nurse’s ability to drive home safely. By hour 10 of their second and third back-to-back 12-hour shifts, night-shift nurses suffered a drop in predicted cognitive effectiveness equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.08—legally drunk, according to the researchers.
Newsweek reached out to the American Nurses Association for comment.
