Shift work, working more than eight hour shifts takes a toll on people. Even more than that, working 12 hour night shifts has been shown to have impact on employee health and performance.  Night shift interrupts the natural circadian rhythms leading to disruption in physiological processes like digestions and mental processing; it can increase the risk of cancer, high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease, leading to a higher risk of mortality (Muller, 2015).Shift work not only impacts employee health, the associated fatigue may compound employee error rates and negatively impact overall workplace performance. There was a study conducted of intensive care unit interns who worked a 24-hour schedule every third night to determine medical errors (Muller, 2015). The results showed that the interns made 5.6 times more serious diagnostic errors when they worked the extended shifts as when they worked a standard shift (Muller, 2015).Shift work, particularly night shift hours, are hard on the employees bodies and life balance, may impact their job performance and create a range of employee relations issues (Muller, 2015).Some of the issues that human resources and department management deal with may include, but are not limited to (Muller, 2015):

• Sleeping on the job (intentional and unintentional)
  • This is an example of misconduct- and can lead to the denial of unemployment benefits
• Retention of night shift staff
  • This may lead to the department being understaffed on the unit-leading to patient safety concerns.