Dr Chiara Dall'Ora BSc, MSc, PhD, RN
Lecturer, Nursing Workforce
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Chiara's work mainly entails designing and performing large workforce studies using quantitative routinely collected data. She is part of the Workforce Theme in Health Sciences, a group with unique expertise in extracting, linking and analysing such data in the NHS. Chiara qualified as a Registered Nurse in Italy and, after pursuing a MSc in Nursing and Midwifery Sciences, she completed her PhD within Health Sciences in 2017. Her thesis was about nurses' shift work and job performance. She analysed a large dataset of nurses' shifts from an NHS Trust using multilevel techniques, and her study was the first to find that working 12-hour shifts is associated with higher sickness absence for nurses using objective data.
Enabling nurses to work the safest shift patterns and ensuring that staffing is planned to have the right people with the right skills in place. This is at the heart of my research.
Chiara has extensive knowledge of shift work, both for her experience as a registered nurse, and thanks to the research that she has been carrying out since 2013: in addition to using NHS routinely collected data, she was part of a large European workforce study, the RN4CAST study. Analysing data from more than 30,000 nurses from 12 European countries, she found that working 12-hour shifts and quality/safety outcomes and nurse outcomes. Results of this research have been published on international journals and have been presented at several international conferences.
Chiara's work is mainly funded by the NIHR ARC Wessex and by NIHR grants, and she is leading a two-year study of nurses' shift patterns in Mental Health and Community NHS Trusts.
12-hour shift workers are more prone to burnout
A recent study published in the online journal BMJ Open looked at 12-plus-hour hospital nursing shifts and the link between burnout or job dissatisfaction. Listen to Chiara's interview on the Dr. Leigh Vinocur Show