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Features

If nurses are really 'at breaking point', they should stop working 12-hour shifts

Doing a full week's work in three days is not in patients' interests

5 October 2013

9:00 AM

5 October 2013

9:00 AM

Scarcely a month goes by, or so it seems, without one or other representative body of the medical profession complaining about how dangerously overworked and generally unappreciated its members are. The latest is the Royal College of Nursing — still smarting, perhaps, from the Francis report into the fatal negligence at Stafford Hospital — which found that nurses today are frequently stressed out and ‘forced to choose between the health of their patients and their own’.

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Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world. She now writes for the Independent.

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