Hospitals are a little different in that society has more of an incentive for longer shifts since shift changes end up killing people as the knowledge transfer isn't perfect from one shift to the next. That incentive makes it reasonable to treat healthcare workers a little differently from a legal perspective when compared with jobs with less societal benefit like making iPhones.
Exactly; this idea that we HAVE to overwork our medical professionals is just outdated, and especially since COVID, actively detrimental to our healthcare systems.
Hire more people, pay them more, and give them time off so they don't burn out or get sick themselves.
Fun fact, the American Medical Association artificially limits the number of doctors that can go through residency programs each year. The limit is actually lower than the number of medical school graduates, forcing some small number of new doctors to leave the country because they aren't allowed to become licensed.
We should be aggressively recruiting and training folks to go into the medical professions, and paying for their training so you don't have to go into huge debt to become a doctor.
An overlap improves things slightly, but it isn't a magic solution. If it was that easy to transfer knowledge during an overlap, then they could also document that knowledge for the next shift without any overlap. And if your suggestion really just amounts to hiring more staff improves patient outcomes, I don't think anyone would disagree with you.
We (the US) are in the top 10 when it comes to hours worked / overworked. Nurses are probably within the top 10 overworked professions within the US. High rates of burnout and stress.
Well, there’s no shift manager walking the hallways in hospitals with clubs threatening you to work faster or suffer punishment. And the nurses can quit without fear of violence or imprisonment.
My point is that the horrible sorts of working conditions which you mention are orthogonal to the shift length. EDIT: So if they are doing the things you mention (or exposing workers to asbestos, or paying starvation wages, or whatever), then that would be the real problem, which needs to be treated as such.
My mother did twelve-hour shifts as a nurse because that was her preference. There were plenty of opportunities for more traditional shifts but because most nursing jobs with twelve-hour shifts are working seven days straight and then have seven days off, she liked it better having those long stretches of uninterrupted days off when she could pursue her personal interests. My siblings and I adapted pretty quickly and learned to hold anything that wasn't an emergency or needed immediate attention until her days off.
If tens (or hundreds?) of thousands of rather well-paid American professionals are also working in the conditions mentioned (12-hour shifts), then I assume that the headline is "anything that says 'Apple'" clickbait.
Or a symptom of sheltered & pampered western office workers - who at times seem to view normal, physical work as a human rights violation.
I used to do 12 hour shifts in EMS, where men and women are on the same shift system, so no issue with the hours. But factory work (which I've also done, 8 hour shifts) is constantly intense across the whole shift and I wouldn't want to do it for 12 hours.
