Association of Job Shift Length with Quality Nursing Care in Tertiary Care Hospitals, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Nurses are the backbone of hospitals, as they spend more time with patient care compared to other health care professionals. Consistently, nurses are doing their duties in various shifts of different lengths. Usually, long shift duty hours are commonly associated with poor-quality nursing care. Objective: To assess the association of job shift length with quality nursing care in a tertiary care hospital in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Methods: A descriptive correlative design was used to find out the association between study variables. The target population was the registered nurses working in public hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. A convenient sampling approach was used to collect data from 377 nurses working in tertiary care hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa via an adapted questionnaire. Data were analyzed through SPSS version 26.0 for the frequency, percentage, and mean for demographic variables, and the association, the Spearman rank correlation test was used. Results: The findings show that the majority of the participants were male (56.2%), and more than half were young nurses (54.9%). There was a strong positive relationship between small shift length and quality nursing care and a weak negative in the case of long shifts. However, individual subscales show a positive association between shift duration and quality nursing care. Conclusions: It was concluded that there was a mixed association between shift length and quality care. The study suggests that proper documentation and working in medium shifts instead of long shifts can enhance patient safety and quality care.