Early-Career Nurses’ Experiences of Micro-Breaks During Long Hospital Shifts in Saudi Arabia: A Qualitative Study

Background/Objectives: Early-career nurses in 24-h hospital services face sustained demands that may contribute to fatigue and intentions to leave. Micro-breaks may offer within-shift recovery when formal breaks are delayed or missed, but little is known about how nurses negotiate them within organizational and cultural contexts. This study explored how early-career nurses experienced and negotiated brief recovery during long shifts. Methods: A narrative inquiry with an interpretive orientation was conducted in two tertiary teaching hospitals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Twenty-two registered nurses with less than five years of clinical experience, recruited by purposive maximum-variation sampling, completed semi-structured narrative interviews between August and November 2025. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis attentive to narrative structure. Reporting followed COREQ. Results: Four interrelated themes were developed: the long shift embodied; micro-breaks as acts of quiet recovery; cultural scripts and the politics of rest; and micro-breaks, meaning, and intention to remain. Participants described fatigue as normalized, brief pauses as restorative, and access to rest as shaped by workload, hierarchy, gender, and leadership. Conclusions: Access to micro-breaks appeared to depend not only on workload but on whether unit culture and leadership treated brief recovery as legitimate. The study examined intention to remain, not actual retention.