Lois James
Washington State University, USA
Title: Nursing students’ sleep patterns and perceptions of safe practice
Biography
Biography: Lois James
Abstract
Statement of the Problem: Nursing students make an abrupt transition from traditional classes into clinical rotations and shift work. Understanding student nurses’ initial sleep patterns in response to clinical rotations can yield insights into opportunities for occupational interventions at the university and hospital level. The purpose of this project was to describe students’ sleep patterns and perceptions of safe practice during their first semester of clinical rotations.
Methodology: We measured the sleep of 19 full-time J2 nursing students before, during, and after their first clinical rotations. Sleep was measured objectively using wrist activity monitors (actigraphy) and sleepiness was measured using sleep diaries for seven consecutive days at each time period. During these same time periods we used Bandura’s self-efficacy scales to measure students’ perceptions of safe practice. We then used multi-level-modeling (MLM) to explore associations between students’ sleep, sleepiness, and their perceptions of safe practice.
Findings: Nursing students’ sleep quantity did not differ across time periods; they consistently received approximately 7 hours and 20 minutes per night. The number of students reporting sleepiness however increased from 29% before rotations, to 32% during rotations, to 39% after rotations. Furthermore, students assigned to night shift rotations had lower self-efficacy scores than students assigned to day shift rotations (82% vs. 87%). Finally, within individual students, feeling sleepy significantly predicted lower safe-practice self-efficacy scores (f=42.55; df=1.60; p<.001).
Conclusion & Significance: Our results reveal that sleepiness significantly degrades student confidence in their ability to perform safe nursing practice. Our work addresses a gap in the total worker health (TWH) research by examining a critical period in the professional development of nurses, and helps to guide occupational interventions—particularly those targeted towards reducing nursing student sleepiness.