Working overtime associated with less collaboration between nurses and physicians

Editor's Note

In this study, working overtime negatively influenced nurse-nurse and nurse-physician collaboration.

Survey data from 24,013 nurses in 957 units from 168 hospitals in the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators showed that one third of nurses work beyond their scheduled shifts.

One hour of overtime was associated with a 0.17 decrease in collaboration on the RN-RN scale and was marginally associated with a 0.13 decrease on the RN-MD scale. Shift length was not associated with lower collaboration.

The findings support policies that limit the amount of overtime worked by nurses, the authors say.