Hospital help for weary night-shift nurses

You might call what Cheryl Burnette does “nursing nurses.”

Sometimes, they need it. For while nursing can be rewarding, it also can mean stress, shiftwork, paperwork, grumpy patients and the occasional barking doctor. That’s why the national average of nurses who leave that profession, said chief nursing officer Patti McCue, of Centra Health, is above 30 percent.

But at Centra, McCue continued, that percentage has dropped to 4.4. And she gives Burnette a lot of the credit.

“Cheryl made it a priority to spend time with new graduates just coming into nursing,” McCue said. “Periodically, she sits down with them and asks them for feedback on how their job is going, what problems they’re running into.”

And how they’re sleeping, which Burnette came to realize was a key issue.

“When a new nurse comes in on the night shift, for instance,” Burnette said, “sleeping during the day can be extremely difficult to adjust to.”

This might all seem quite obvious but apparently not.

“It turns out that we’re ahead of the curve,” McCue said.

That was confirmed earlier this year by the national Nursing Management Congress Planning Panel, which presented Burnette with the Judges’ Choice Award for her poster presentation “Smart Sleep: Implementing a Creative Sleep Program for New Nurse Graduates.”

Burnette used information from Centra’s sleep disorders clinic to put together her program. The company’s first “retention coordinator” (a job McCue created for Burnette), she also provides a sleep mask and ear plugs for all of the nurses under her guidance.

“Sleeping during the day can be particularly hard,” Burnette said, “because our Circadian rhythms are triggered by light. If you have to do your sleeping then, it’s important that you block out as much light as you can. Just closing the blinds may not be enough.”

Everyone knows that it’s not a good idea to down a stern cup of well-caffeinated coffee just before bedtime, but alcohol also can keep some people awake. Nicotine, a stimulant, can have a similar effect.

Most of us also are rather cavalier about our choice of mattresses and pillows. A few minutes of testing a mattress in the store can prevent a lot of sore muscles and lost sleep later.

McCue sees all this as a patient care as well as nurse-friendly issue. If you’ve ever shared your hospital room with a grouchy nurse, there is a strong possibility that she (or he) has been missing out on sleep. Moreover, nurses are taking on expanded roles these days, and you don’t want someone drawing your blood or selecting your medicine when their eyelids are at half-mast.

Part of the rise in Centra’s nurse retention rate, I suppose, could be that with the economy at low ebb, people tend to hang on to the jobs they have. But McCue isn’t going there.

Much of the change in their percentage happened over the past few years before the economy got bad, she said. I really think it has a lot to do with Cheryl’s program.

At any rate, she no longer has to lose any sleep over it.