THE RESPONSE OF DAY AND NIGHT NURSES TO THEIR WORK SCHEDULES

Large numbers of people are now required to work at night despite growing concern over the detrimental effects which may result for the individual shiftworker. Day‐ and night‐shift nurses at a psychiatric hospital were compared, in order to highlight any differences between them on a range of measures. These comprised (a) their satisfaction with their shift schedule in relation to the amount and distribution of free time, the actual hours of work, and the number and timing of breaks; (b) the interference to the shift schedule with their private lives in terms of sleep and fatigue problems as well as social and domestic inconvenience; (c) their reported levels of stress over the past month; and (d) the value they attached to time off work at different times of the day and for different days of the week, and the relationship it may have with absenteeism from work. The results indicated the importance of day vs. night work in determining the level of some of these measures, and in particular stress, domestic inconvenience, satisfaction and the value of time off work, as well as indicating that other factors such as age and whether or not they were permanent night‐workers may influence the magnitude of these effects on the night shift. 1991 The British Psychological Society