Patient's Safety on the Night Shift: Systematic Review of Literature

Abstract

Night work is a condition of today's society with widely studied implications for the health and well-being of individuals, and it also compromises the ability of the workforce and the quality of their work. With the present article, a systematic review was made about the general theme of patient safety during the night shift, exploring themes such as the impact of night work on performance and the impact of night work on patient safety. A survey was conducted in the SCOPUS, PubMed and Web of Science databases from May to June 2017. It was determined that nurses and physicians experience sleep deprivation, impairing working memory capacity, speed of information processing, perceptual reasoning and cognitive flexibility, making them more susceptible to error when providing health care during night shifts.