Critical Care and Emergency Nurses’ Challenges in Having Meals and Restorative Breaks at a Large Tertiary Hospital

Nurses need undisturbed break time on each shift to balance the emotional and physical demands required to provide high quality care to patients and to keep more front-line nurses at the bedside. To measure the nurse's challenges in their work environment. A validated questionnaire with 17 items was used to measure the factors related to break time to 378 nurses during duty time from emergency and critical care departments of a tertiary care hospital in Riyadh, Cross-sectionally. This study was approved by the ethical committee. Total 33% of the nurses felt that their units did not have a restorative break environment. Only 63.6% of our nurses between the age group 20-30 with < 3 years’ experience ‘sometimes’ had a break except at mealtime. 43% of the nurses felt their workload was increased due to their coworker’s absenteeism. 37% of the nurses had always sacrificed their break to fulfill the patient care responsibilities assigned to them. They revealed that 37% of the nurses sometimes had health problems because of missing breaks and meals during duty. We observed staff staff-related challenges were more compared to Administration and Patient related challenges.