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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1517189
This article is part of the Research Topic Patient and Medical Staff Safety and Healthy Work Environment in the 21st Century View all 25 articles
Examining Shift Duration and Sociodemographic Influences on the Well-Being of Healthcare Professionals in the United Arab Emirates: A Cross-Sectional Study
Provisionally accepted
Salaheddine Bendak 1*
Iffat Elbarazi 2
Oumara Alajlouni 3 Sana O. Al-Rawi 4 Amal A. Samra 5
Moien AB Khan 2*- 1 College of Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
- 2 United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates
- 3 University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
- 4 Al Qassimi Hospital for Women and Children (AQWCH), Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
- 5 Abu Dhabi Health Services Co., Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Objective: Providing quality healthcare is an essential part of the healthcare system. The high workload and night work associated with healthcare providing may result in work-life imbalance among healthcare professionals (HCPs) and in degradation in the quality of care.This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the effects of sociodemographic characteristics and shift work on HCPs' well-being in four large hospitals in The United Arab Emirates using a validated questionnaire. Results: Responses from 526 participants indicated that 79.2% of them were under the age of 40, 70.2% were females and 50.2% were single or divorced. Responses indicated that many HCPs reported engaging in unhealthy behaviors such as consuming energy drinks (37.3%), smoking (14.2%) and taking stimulant pills (5.7%) with males being more susceptible to these practices compared to females. Results also showed that participants perceived their overall health rate, on the average, to be moderate with one third of participants indicating to be overweight. Moreover, results showed that many participants reported having blood pressure issues (16%), diabetes (8.6%) and/or heart diseases (2.7%), with females more prone to these diseases than males. Another important finding was that most respondents reported sleeping significantly less than the recommended duration and taking too long time to fall asleep. Finally, results revealed that HCPs on 12-hr shifts indicated having greater satisfaction but tend to experience more exhaustion levels and worsened health indicators than those on 8-hr shifts. Conclusions: HCPs work has adverse effects on their wellbeing especially when combined with working at night. Healthcare implications of the results as well as recommendations to improve the well-being of HCPs based on the findings are given at the end.
Keywords: healthcare professionals, Night shifts, Work duration, Sociodemographic characteristics, Well-being
Received: 25 Oct 2024; Accepted: 10 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bendak, Elbarazi, Alajlouni, Al-Rawi, Samra and Khan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Salaheddine Bendak, College of Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Moien AB Khan, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates
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