Shift Work Fatigue and Driving Risk — The Human Cost

At 8:17 a.m. on Highway 9 in Forsyth County, Georgia, the collision was already physics in motion. A blue Volkswagen with its nose caved in, a white Tahoe pinned and broken. Inside, a seventy-two-

year-old woman named Jean Holbrook fighting for breath. And behind the wheel of the Volkswagen, a nurse—twenty-four years old, just off her third twelve-and-a-half-hour night in a row. She told deputies she had fallen asleep.

No alcohol. No drugs. Just fatigue.

By late morning, Holbrook was dead. The nurse, Kayla Proctor, was booked into jail, charged with homicide by vehicle in the second degree.

Shift Work Fatigue and Driving Risk

What does it mean when exhaustion is criminalized?

Science is clear: twelve-hour nights, stacked in sequence, destabilize circadian rhythms. Reaction times slow, attention fractures, microsleeps steal seconds on the road.

For decades, research has charted the toll—cardiac risk, metabolic strain, cognitive erosion—and still we place nurses, paramedics, police, pilots, truck drivers, millions of shift workers, into these rotations. Then we send them home on daylight roads when their bodies are built to be unconscious.

The tragic events in Forsyth County illustrate, with devastating clarity, the real-world consequences of shift work fatigue and driving risk—a hazard written into the schedules of those who keep essential systems running overnight.

Prosecution

To prosecute the physiological outcome of a system-wide demand is to misplace blame. We know better. Fatigue is not weakness. It is biology. In Forsyth County, the arrest sets a precedent heavy with consequence. If fatigue behind the wheel becomes criminal, then every nurse walking out into the morning sun, every resident driving home after a 28-hour call, every EMT pulling off a double becomes a potential defendant.

The weight will drive people out of the work we depend on. It will deepen the shortages that already strain our hospitals. It will add another layer of fear and guilt to a workforce already stretched to breaking.

What we need is not punishment, but redesign—evidence-based schedules, transportation support, institutional acknowledgment that human bodies are bound to circadian law.

Until then, nurses will keep leaving night shift into morning traffic. And some mornings, someone won’t make it home.

Focus Keyword: shift work fatigue and driving risk

Keywords: nurse fatigue, night shift safety, circadian disruption, fatigue-related accidents, healthcare workforce shortage, public safety, fatigue and driving

Author: R.E. Hengsterman, MSN, MA, M.E., RN

Registered nurse, night-shift administrator, and author of The Shift Worker’s Paradox

Nursewhowrites.com

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice.