Table des Matières
How far does a nurse really walk during a 12-hour hospital shift? One ICU study estimated 10.7 km, but larger and newer research shows that there is no universal nursing distance. The more revealing question is why those kilometres happen, which journeys are essential to patient care, and which are created by hospital layout, supply access and fragmented workflow.
Twelve hours can contain a remarkable amount of movement.
One small ICU study estimated 10.7 km in a 12-hour shift. Nurses caring for two patients averaged 12.3 km rather than 8.9 km for those caring for one.
A separate longitudinal time-and-motion study found nurses completing an average of 72.3 tasks per hour, with an average task lasting only 55 seconds.
In a large medication-administration study, 53.1% of observed administrations were interrupted at least once. Each additional interruption was associated with a 12.7% increase in the clinical-error rate in the study's statistical model.
In one emergency-department improvement project, nurses working 12-hour shifts left patient rooms a median of 10 times to look for supplies before a point-of-use redesign. Afterwards, the median was one trip.
And in a 2026 emergency-department study, nurses sometimes had to search three or four bedside carts for a required supply because commonly used items were understocked.
These figures do not describe one mythical "average nursing shift". They come from different hospitals, years, countries, specialties and research methods.
But together they reveal something more useful than a single step count.
Hospital nursing is not only physically demanding. It is highly fragmented, and some of that fragmentation is created by the environment in which the work takes place.
Quick Answer: How Far Does a Nurse Walk in a 12-Hour Shift?
There is no scientifically valid universal distance.
The widely shared 10.7 km figure comes from Nahk and Frolova's 2009 ICU study of just 17 nurses. It is a useful example of how far nurses can walk, but it should not be presented as "the average nurse walks 10.7 km".
More recent research demonstrates substantial variation.
Nakashima, Inoue and Iwasaki's 2025 study automatically collected walking data across 14 wards of a large acute-care hospital. Walking distance varied by shift and ward, and the emergency ward stood out for particularly high distances. Nurse-call volume was also associated with greater walking distance.
Other studies have reported roughly 6.5 km and 9,003 steps during particular 12-hour perioperative ICU shifts.
So the most useful answer is:
A nurse may walk several kilometres during a hospital shift, but the distance depends heavily on the unit, workload, patient assignment, shift and physical environment.
That variability is not noise. It is part of the story.
What Did the 10.7 km ICU Study Actually Measure?
Nahk and Frolova monitored 17 ICU nurses for a total of 102 hours.
Eight nurses were responsible for one ICU patient and nine were responsible for two.
The mean recorded distance was approximately 0.9 km per hour, which produced an estimated 10.7 km across 12 hours.
Nurses caring for one patient averaged approximately 8.9 km per 12 hours.
Those caring for two averaged approximately 12.3 km.
The authors noted that some shifts could be expected to approach 15 km.
The number is striking, but the limitation is obvious: this was a small ICU study.
It should therefore be read as evidence that substantial walking can occur in nursing, not as a benchmark that every hospital should expect its nurses to match.
That distinction matters because a nurse walking six kilometres is not necessarily experiencing a lighter workload than a nurse walking ten.
Walking Distance Is Not the Same as Nursing Workload
A pedometer measures displacement.
It does not measure everything that happened while the nurse was moving.
Nursing can also involve prolonged standing, repositioning patients, transferring patients, pushing beds or stretchers, moving equipment, bending, reaching, carrying supplies, responding to emergencies and performing physically demanding procedures.
Nor does distance capture cognitive load.
A nurse can walk very little while managing an unstable patient, coordinating several clinicians and making continuous high-consequence decisions.
This is why "Which nurses walk the most?" has no meaningful universal answer.
An emergency nurse may cover enormous distances in one hospital because imaging and supplies are physically dispersed. An ICU nurse elsewhere may work within a compact physical zone while experiencing extremely high physical and cognitive demand.
Distance is one workflow indicator, not a workload score.
What Larger Studies Tell Us About How Nurses Spend Their Time
The scale changes considerably when we move beyond the 17-nurse ICU study.
Hendrich, Chow, Skierczynski and Lu's 2008 time-and-motion study involved 767 medical-surgical nurses across 36 hospital units.
More than three-quarters of recorded time was devoted to nursing practice. Within nursing-practice time, documentation accounted for 35.3%, care coordination for 20.6%, medication administration for 17.2% and patient-care activities for 19.3%.
Those percentages are not a modern universal formula. The study is older, and clinical technology has changed substantially.
But it demonstrates something that remains relevant:
Nursing work is distributed across many locations and activities.
The nurse at the bedside is only one part of the shift.
Medication work, documentation, coordination, movement and communication all compete for the same limited time.
Westbrook, Duffield, Li and Creswick provided another revealing view in 2011. Their longitudinal study found nurses completing an average of 72.3 tasks per hour, with a mean task length of only 55 seconds. Nurses spent about 37% of observed time with patients, while medication tasks, direct and indirect care and professional communication consumed most of the working day.
That does not mean nurses spend "only 37%" of their time providing care.
Documentation is care.
Medication administration is care.
Coordination is care.
The important question is narrower:
How much of the shift is consumed by friction that did not need to exist?
A More Useful Way to Think About the Kilometres
It helps to separate nursing movement into three conceptual groups.
This is an editorial framework for interpreting the evidence, not a validated scientific classification.
Care kilometres
These are journeys directly required by patient care.
Going to assess a patient, responding to a call, mobilising with a patient, reaching an emergency or moving between assigned rooms all belong here.
Reducing these kilometres simply because the number looks high may be counterproductive.
Coordination kilometres
These journeys make the healthcare system function.
Examples include moving between clinical teams, reaching diagnostic services, retrieving specialist equipment or accessing resources that reasonably cannot be placed beside every patient.
Some are unavoidable. Others may be redesigned.
Retrieval kilometres
These are especially interesting.
The nurse has already reached the place where care is happening, but something required to complete the task is somewhere else.
The dressing material is missing.
The trolley is empty.
The item is stored in another room.
The nurse checks one cart, then another.
The task stops while the supply search begins.
These are the kilometres that hospital workflow teams should examine first.
Ten Supply Trips Became One
Richardson and colleagues published one of the clearest examples in 2014.
Their emergency-department team used Lean methods to examine nurses leaving patient rooms to obtain supplies.
Before the intervention, nurses working 12-hour shifts left patient rooms a median of 10 times per shift to search for supplies.
After implementing a standardised point-of-use storage system, that fell to a median of one trip.
For eight-hour shifts, the median decreased from 11 trips to 2.5.
This result is powerful because the intervention did not ask nurses to walk faster.
It did not ask them to become "better at time management".
It changed the system around them.
That should be the default mindset when avoidable nursing movement is identified:
Before trying to change the worker, ask whether the work environment is creating the problem.
In 2026, Researchers Found Nurses Searching Three or Four Carts
Hefter and colleagues took the same question deeper in a 2026 mixed-methods study of bedside supply carts in an urban emergency department.
The department already had five-drawer supply carts positioned outside patient rooms.
In theory, supplies were therefore close to the point of care.
In practice, the carts were frequently understocked.
High-frequency items did not have enough allocated capacity.
Low-frequency supplies occupied valuable space.
Some nurses stopped trusting the carts altogether and travelled to central storage instead.
Others sometimes searched three or four carts for the required item.
That is an important distinction.
The hospital possessed the supplies.
The department possessed carts.
Yet the required item was not reliably available where and when it was needed.
Inventory availability and point-of-use availability are not the same thing.
What Happened When the Cart Was Redesigned Around Real Use?
Hefter and colleagues worked with nursing staff and other clinicians, observed the workflow, analysed supply consumption and redesigned the cart around actual demand.
After the redesign, supply-acquisition speed improved by approximately 20%, availability of the most important supplies roughly tripled and required restocking fell from about once per shift to once every three shifts.
This does not prove that every hospital will reproduce those percentages.
It was one emergency department.
What transfers much more reliably is the design principle:
Do not organise clinical storage according to what fits neatly. Organise it according to what clinicians actually use.
A Full Cart Can Still Be the Wrong Cart
This is one reason drawer count is such a weak purchasing criterion.
Two five-drawer medical carts can contain the same total volume and support very different workflows.
One may place high-frequency items in predictable, easy-to-reach locations and use consistent layouts throughout the department.
Another may distribute the same items across multiple drawers, mix frequently and rarely used supplies and rely on staff memory.
The specification sheet says "five drawers" in both cases.
The nurse experiences something completely different.
Before hospitals compare products, they should understand the clinical roles of different trolley types. Optium's Crash Cart vs Medication Cart vs Anesthesia Cart guide explains why emergency, medication, anaesthesia and procedure carts should not be treated as interchangeable mobile cabinets.
Hospitals can then compare the broader Optium Medical Carts range against the workflow they have already mapped.
The order matters:
workflow first, equipment second.
Medication Rounds Create One Kind of Movement
Medication work requires predictable organisation, controlled access, identification and movement between patients.
Optium's UT 29 Medicine Trolley, for example, includes multiple drawer depths, internal separators, labels, central locking and a pull-out work surface.
Those specifications do not prove that the trolley reduces errors or walking.
They simply create design characteristics that a hospital can evaluate against its medication workflow.
The useful question is:
Does the trolley's organisation reflect the order in which our staff actually work?
Dressing and Procedure Work Creates Another
Wound care and routine bedside procedures often use several supplies in sequence.
If each item lives in a different place, a single procedure can create multiple departures from the bedside.
A procedure-specific trolley may keep predictable task sets together. Optium's UT 27 Dressing and Procedure Trolley combines organised storage with a working surface, transparent boxes, an IV pole and waste handling.
The UNICART DRESSING Dressing and Medication Cart uses a different five-drawer architecture.
Neither is inherently the better choice.
The better question is:
What should move with the nurse so the nurse does not repeatedly have to move for it?
Emergency and Anaesthesia Work Need Different Logic
An emergency trolley is not simply a bigger medication trolley.
During resuscitation, predictability and rapid access matter. Standardisation across equivalent emergency carts can reduce the need to search an unfamiliar layout during a time-critical event.
Examples in Optium's range include the UT 26 Emergency Trolley and UNICART EMERGENCY Emergency Cart.
Anaesthesia creates another specialised access pattern. The UT 28 Anesthesia Trolley and UNICART ANESTHESIA Anaesthesia Cart use different architectures for organised procedural storage.
Again, none of these products should be treated as evidence that a trolley alone improves clinical outcomes.
A trolley is one component of a larger system that includes stocking, security, checking, location, training, cleaning and local clinical protocols.
Walking Is Only the Visible Form of Workflow Fragmentation
Sometimes the nurse leaves the room.
Sometimes the task is interrupted without the nurse moving at all.
Medication administration is one of the best studied examples.
Westbrook and colleagues' 2010 observational study followed 98 nurses preparing and administering 4,271 medications to 720 patients across 505 observation hours.
Interruptions occurred during 53.1% of administrations.
Each additional interruption was associated with a 12.7% increase in the clinical-error rate in the model. The estimated risk of a major error rose from 2.3% without interruptions to 4.7% with four interruptions.
The word associated matters.
This observational research does not prove that every interruption causes an error.
Some interruptions are necessary.
A colleague warning a nurse about a deteriorating patient is technically an interruption and may improve safety.
The finding is important because it shows how fragmented medication work can become, not because all interruptions should be eliminated.
How Common Are Nursing Interruptions?
Biron, Loiselle and Lavoie-Tremblay's 2009 evidence review included 23 studies.
Fourteen had sufficient observation data to calculate an interruption rate, producing a pooled estimate of 6.7 interruptions per hour.
The authors also highlighted inconsistent definitions and methodological weaknesses between studies.
So 6.7 should not be treated as a universal modern benchmark.
Its value is conceptual.
A long nursing shift can contain repeated context switching, and a missing supply can become more than a physical detour if another demand appears while the original task remains unfinished.
Why a Missing Supply Can Cost More Than the Walk
Imagine a nurse begins a procedure and discovers one required item is absent.
The nurse leaves the room.
On the way to storage, a colleague asks a question.
A call bell activates.
Another patient now needs help.
The original task remains unfinished.
When the nurse returns, the problem is no longer simply the metres walked.
The nurse has to reconstruct the task:
What has already been completed?
What remains?
Has anything changed?
This is why physical workflow and cognitive workflow are connected.
A badly located consumable can create movement, delay and context switching at the same time.
Fewer Steps Are Not Automatically Better
This is where "reduce nurse walking" becomes too simplistic.
Imagine a redesigned unit that puts nurses closer to patients and encourages more frequent room visits.
Walking could increase.
Would the redesign automatically be worse?
Of course not.
Research on decentralised nursing stations demonstrates these trade-offs.
Fay, Cai and Real's 2019 systematic review identified more than 200 papers and evaluated 21 empirical studies in detail. The findings were mixed: decentralised nursing stations showed positive trends for some patient-experience measures, while nursing teamwork was perceived to decline in some environments. The authors also found inconsistent definitions and methodological limitations across the literature.
The implication is important:
There is no universally superior nursing-station layout.
The station has to be considered together with everything nurses need to reach.
Moving the Nurse Is Not the Same as Moving the Workflow
A decentralised workstation can put the nurse physically closer to the patient.
But what happens if medication, clean supplies, colleagues and specialist equipment remain centralised?
The nurse may simply travel between a decentralised workstation and a centralised support system.
That is why a layout should be evaluated as a network of destinations rather than a single nurse-station location.
A better design question is:
Where does the nurse need to go during the most common clinical workflows, and why?
That question is much harder than choosing between "centralised" and "decentralised".
It is also much more useful.
What the Floor Plan Does Not Show
Architectural drawings show distance.
They rarely show repetition.
Thirty metres to a supply room may look trivial.
But a round trip is 60 metres.
Five unnecessary retrievals create 300 metres.
Across 20 nurses, that becomes six kilometres of movement.
Repeated every day, one small layout or stocking decision can produce substantial accumulated travel.
That example is hypothetical, but the principle is real:
Repeated friction scales.
A floor plan also cannot tell you which trolley nurses trust, which drawer they open first, which stock disappears halfway through every shift or which item repeatedly sends staff back to central supply.
For that, hospitals need observation and staff input.
Five Practical Tests Before Redesigning a Nursing Workflow
The leave-and-return test
Observe routine bedside tasks and record every time a nurse begins the task, leaves the room and then returns.
The goal is not to label every departure as waste.
Record why it happened.
A clinical emergency and a missing gauze pack are not the same type of journey.
The three-cart test
Ask:
If this item is not in this trolley, where do you look next?
If the answer is another trolley, then another trolley, then central storage, the hospital has found a workflow worth measuring.
That pattern was directly documented in Hefter and colleagues' 2026 emergency-department study.
The first-drawer test
Ask several nurses what should live in the first drawer of the same cart.
If they all give the same answer but the item lives somewhere else, the cart may not reflect the workflow.
If they all give different answers, there may be no shared standard.
If equivalent carts use different layouts, the issue may be standardisation.
If nobody trusts the drawer because it is regularly empty, the problem is probably replenishment rather than layout.
The float-nurse test
Give the ward to an experienced nurse who normally works elsewhere.
Can they locate routine supplies, emergency equipment, clean linen, medication resources and the appropriate trolley without repeatedly asking for directions?
This is not a test of the nurse.
It is a test of how legible the environment is.
The full-cart test
Never evaluate a trolley only while it is empty.
Load realistic stock.
Push it through actual corridors.
Enter a fully furnished patient room.
Use the brakes.
Open the frequently used drawers.
Simulate cleaning.
Park it where it will really live.
Then ask staff whether the cart removes work or simply gives them another object to manoeuvre.
The Patient Room Is a System Too
Hospital procurement often separates beds, furniture and mobile equipment into different purchasing exercises.
Nurses do not experience them separately.
They experience one room.
A bedside cabinet can obstruct trolley access.
An overbed table can narrow the usable path around a bed.
A large trolley may work perfectly in a corridor and poorly once a patient room contains a bed, chair, visitor, IV equipment and clinical devices.
That is why patient-room furniture should be considered as part of workflow geometry rather than merely as storage.
Optium's Bedside Cabinets and Overbed Tables range contains multiple configurations for different room layouts.
A combined product such as the OCB 56 Bedside Cabinet with Overbed Table illustrates one way functions can be combined, but the relevant question is not whether combined furniture is universally superior.
It is:
What happens to the room when every person and every piece of equipment is actually present?
Do Long Shifts Make Small Inefficiencies More Important?
Potentially.
Clendon and Gibbons' 2015 systematic review examined 13 studies of sufficient methodological quality with a total sample of 67,967 nurses.
Six studies reported higher error rates for nurses working 12 hours or more, four reported higher rates during shorter shifts and three reported no difference. The six studies showing higher error rates during long shifts represented most of the total sample.
This evidence should not be reduced to "12-hour shifts are unsafe".
Shift length interacts with staffing, fatigue, breaks, patient acuity and many other variables.
For this article, the relevant point is narrower:
The longer a pressured shift lasts, the more opportunities repeated friction has to accumulate.
That makes avoidable trips worth examining, even if they are not the primary cause of workload.
Does Unnecessary Walking Cause Missed Nursing Care?
We do not have evidence to make that claim.
Gong, Mei, Wu and Tang's 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis included 28 studies, 20,768 nurses, 121 hospitals and 14 countries.
The most frequently reported reasons for missed care were unexpected increases in patient volume or acuity, inadequate staffing and urgent patient situations.
That matters because discussions about workflow efficiency should never distract from staffing and clinical demand.
A medical cart does not fix a staffing shortage.
A better floor plan does not eliminate high patient acuity.
The defensible argument is much narrower:
When time is already constrained, preventable logistics consume some of that same finite capacity.
That is enough reason to improve them without pretending they are the main cause of every nursing problem.
Hospital Equipment Should Not Be Sold as a Cure for a System Problem
A trolley cannot solve burnout.
A bedside cabinet cannot correct an unsafe staffing ratio.
A medication cart cannot guarantee fewer medication errors.
An emergency cart does not create a safe resuscitation system simply by being present.
Equipment can only improve the part of the workflow it physically influences.
That is why responsible procurement starts with a narrower question:
Does this configuration make necessary clinical work easier to perform without introducing avoidable searching, movement or obstruction?
If the answer is yes, the equipment may support the workflow.
That is different from claiming that the equipment produces a clinical outcome.
What We Know
The evidence supports several fairly robust conclusions.
Nurses can walk several kilometres during a hospital shift, but there is no universal nursing distance.
Hospital unit type, shift, patient assignment and spatial organisation can influence movement patterns.
Supply availability at the point of care can materially alter the number of retrieval journeys.
Poorly stocked carts can create repeated searching even when storage is physically close to the patient.
Participatory redesign can improve supply access when cart contents are aligned with actual clinical use.
Interruptions are common in nursing work, and medication-administration research has repeatedly identified them as an important human-factors concern.
What We Do Not Know
We do not know the "correct" number of steps a nurse should take.
We do not know that a shorter walking distance automatically means a better ward.
We do not know that a particular trolley will reduce medication errors.
We do not know that decentralised nursing stations are universally superior.
We do not know that eliminating a supply trip automatically creates additional bedside time.
And we should not imply that a medical-equipment product improves patient outcomes unless appropriate clinical evidence actually demonstrates it.
That uncertainty does not weaken the workflow argument.
It makes it more credible.
Frequently Asked Questions About Nurse Walking Distance
How far does a nurse walk in a 12-hour shift?
There is no single average. One small ICU study estimated 10.7 km during 12 hours, while newer research across multiple wards has reported different distances depending on the unit and shift. Several kilometres per hospital shift is plausible, but any universal number should be treated cautiously.
How many miles is 10.7 km?
10.7 km is approximately 6.6 miles. The 12.3 km average reported for nurses caring for two ICU patients in the 2009 study is approximately 7.6 miles.
How many steps does a nurse take during a shift?
There is no universal step count. Published research and individual nursing environments vary substantially. Step count depends on unit size, role, patient assignment, workflow and physical layout.
Do emergency nurses walk more than ICU nurses?
They can, but this cannot be generalised to every hospital. In Nakashima and colleagues' 2025 hospital study, the emergency ward had particularly high walking distances, but that finding reflects that hospital's workload and spatial configuration.
Why do nurses walk so much?
Because nursing requires movement between patients, workstations, medications, supplies, equipment, diagnostic areas and other clinicians. Some journeys are inherent to care. Others can be generated by poor supply placement, stockouts, layout or fragmented workflows.
Is nurse walking wasted time?
No. Most nursing movement should not automatically be labelled waste. The useful distinction is between movement required to provide care and avoidable movement created by searching, missing stock or poor placement.
How often do nurses leave patient rooms to search for supplies?
There is no universal rate. In Richardson and colleagues' emergency-department project, the median for 12-hour shifts fell from ten supply-search exits to one after a standardised point-of-use storage intervention.
Can medical carts reduce unnecessary nurse walking?
Potentially, if the trolley is correctly positioned, reliably stocked and organised around actual clinical use. A poorly stocked trolley can produce additional searching instead.
Does a bigger medical cart mean a better workflow?
No. A large cart can still understock frequently used items while devoting excessive space to low-use items. What matters is alignment between inventory, drawer organisation, task sequence and replenishment.
Should every medical cart use the same layout?
Equivalent carts serving the same purpose may benefit from standardisation. Different clinical cart types should not necessarily share identical layouts because medication rounds, resuscitation, anaesthesia and dressing work have different requirements.
How often are nurses interrupted?
It varies widely by setting and definition. Biron and colleagues' evidence review estimated 6.7 interruptions per hour across 14 studies with sufficient observation data, while other studies have reported different rates.
How often is medication administration interrupted?
Westbrook and colleagues observed at least one interruption during 53.1% of 4,271 medication administrations in their 2010 study.
Do interruptions cause medication errors?
The evidence primarily demonstrates association rather than a simple universal causal relationship. In the Westbrook study, greater interruption frequency was associated with more clinical errors and greater estimated error severity.
Does hospital layout affect nurse walking?
Yes, physical layout can influence movement, but research does not identify one universally best nursing-unit design. The relationship depends on where patients, supplies, staff, medication areas and support services are located relative to one another.
Are decentralised nursing stations better?
Not automatically. Some studies suggest benefits for patient proximity, while others identify disadvantages for communication, teamwork or walking depending on how other hospital resources are distributed.
Can reducing unnecessary walking improve patient care?
It can return time and physical capacity to the workflow, but fewer metres do not automatically produce better patient outcomes. The effect depends on which journeys are eliminated and what happens with the capacity that is released.
A 10-Minute Nurse Workflow Audit Before Buying Anything
Before specifying another cart, cabinet or workstation, spend ten minutes watching the existing workflow.
First, watch where a routine bedside task begins and count how often the nurse has to leave before completing it.
Then record what caused each departure.
Was it the patient?
A missing consumable?
A medication?
Equipment?
Waste disposal?
Documentation?
Another clinician?
Next, ask the nurse which item is most frequently missing, which trolley they trust least and which drawer they open most often.
Check whether equivalent trolleys have equivalent layouts.
Look at which supplies regularly run out and which remain almost untouched.
Finally, repeat the exercise on a night shift or ask night staff whether the same workflow still works when staffing and support services change.
Only then should the equipment discussion begin.
If the workflow requires mobile emergency, medication, anaesthesia or procedure storage, hospitals can use the Optium medical cart comparison guide and Medical Carts portfolio to compare configurations against the requirements identified during the audit.
That sequence prevents one of the most common procurement mistakes:
buying a product first and discovering the workflow afterwards.
What 10.7 km Really Tells Us
The most interesting thing about the 10.7 km figure is not that it is large.
It is that the number changes.
Another ward produces a different distance.
Day differs from night.
One patient assignment differs from another.
One building differs from another.
One stocking system differs from another.
That does not prove the building is responsible for every difference. Patient acuity, staffing, assignments, measurement methods and clinical workload all matter.
But it does tell us that walking distance is not an immutable property of the nursing profession.
Some of those metres may be created by choices hospitals can change.
Where supplies live.
How carts are stocked.
Whether equivalent equipment is standardised.
How rooms are arranged.
Whether the nurse can trust the point-of-use inventory.
And whether a task can be completed after the nurse reaches the patient, rather than requiring another journey somewhere else.
The goal, therefore, is not to make nurses walk as little as possible.
A hospital where nurses rarely reach patients would hardly represent good workflow.
The better objective is simpler:
Remove the journeys that do not need to exist.
The trip caused by an empty drawer.
The second trip because the first item was wrong.
The search through several trolleys.
The detour caused by supplies positioned far from the work they support.
Those steps deserve scrutiny precisely because nursing already contains so many steps that cannot and should not be removed.
The goal is not fewer footsteps. It is to make more of those footsteps matter.
Key References
Nahk E, Frolova S. (2009). Distances covered by ICU nurses during their shifts. Critical Care, 13(Suppl 1). Seventeen ICU nurses were monitored for 102 hours; the estimated mean was 10.7 km per 12-hour shift. Read the study
Hendrich A, Chow MP, Skierczynski BA, Lu Z. (2008). A 36-Hospital Time and Motion Study: How Do Medical-Surgical Nurses Spend Their Time? The Permanente Journal, 12(3), 25–34. The study involved 767 nurses and examined nursing activity, location and movement. Read the study
Westbrook JI, Duffield C, Li L, Creswick NJ. (2011). How much time do nurses have for patients? BMC Health Services Research, 11:319. Nurses averaged 72.3 tasks per hour with an average task length of 55 seconds. Read the study
Westbrook JI et al. (2010). Association of Interruptions With an Increased Risk and Severity of Medication Administration Errors. Archives of Internal Medicine, 170(8). The study directly observed 4,271 medication administrations and found interruptions in 53.1%. Read the study
Biron AD, Loiselle CG, Lavoie-Tremblay M. (2009). Work Interruptions and Their Contribution to Medication Administration Errors: An Evidence Review. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 6, 70–86. The review estimated 6.7 interruptions per hour from 14 studies with sufficient data. Read the review
Richardson DM et al. (2014). Using Lean Methodology to Decrease Wasted RN Time in Seeking Supplies in Emergency Departments. Journal of Nursing Administration, 44(11), 606–611. Median supply-search trips during 12-hour shifts fell from ten to one after a point-of-use storage intervention. Read the study
Nakashima K, Inoue Y, Iwasaki T, et al. (2025). Factors Affecting Nurses' Walking Distance: Age, Clinical Ladder Level, Wards, Nurse Calls, Weekend, and Patient-To-Nurse Ratio. Journal of Nursing Management. The study analysed automatically collected walking-distance data across 14 hospital wards. Read the study
Hefter K, Dreibelbis S, Haupt T, et al. (2026). Redesign of Bedside Supply Carts to Improve Emergency Department Workflows: Mixed Methods Participatory Design. JMIR Human Factors, 13. Participatory redesign improved supply-acquisition speed and availability while reducing restocking frequency. Read the study
Fay L, Cai H, Real K. (2019). A Systematic Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Decentralized Nursing Stations. HERD. The review evaluated 21 empirical studies and found mixed effects on patient experience and nursing teamwork. Read the review
Gong F, Mei Y, Wu M, Tang C. (2025). Global Reasons for Missed Nursing Care: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. International Nursing Review, 72. Twenty-eight studies involving 20,768 nurses from 121 hospitals in 14 countries were included. Read the review
Clinical and operational note: Walking distance is a workflow indicator, not a measure of nursing quality. Changes to medical carts, storage, staffing, unit layout, medication processes or patient-room equipment should be evaluated against local clinical protocols, infection-control requirements, medication-security policies, staff input, patient acuity and applicable regulations.