British Summer Time ended yesterday night when the clocks went back. Give a thought for those of us nurses and doctors and physios & etc etc etc who were working on the night shift when we had the extra hour! When I volunteered to cover this shift on PICU at the SNC Hospital I hadn't appreciated that daylight saving time was due to change! So while the rest of you got an extra hour in bed we had a very very VERY long shift! The only thing that made it remotely tolerable was the fact that we could take a bit longer over our breaks. In fairness I should add that I worked the short night last spring when the clocks went forward so I guess it all evens out in the end.
Just for the record; we had a 1am BST followed an hour later by 1am Greenwich Mean Time.
On the whole I enjoy working shifts - I like the variety in the work pattern. I also enjoy having time off midweek: you can go places when it's quiet rather than follow the herd working 9-5 and being off when everyone else is!
I even enjoy night shifts: you can actually focus on caring for patients without all the other extraneous hassle which the NHS seems to generate. The only drawback to night duty being that my body clock always wakes me up by midday when I'm trying to sleep, like it's saying 'hey, it's day time you should be up!' But I get by on 3-4 hours sleep. By the end of four night shifts though I usually feel wiped out... I finish four nights on Tuesday morning.
The thing is as I get older I'm not so sure that I can keep up working crazy nurse's shifts but I don't know what else I'd do!
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