An Evaluation of Fatigue Management Strategies Implemented on Hospital Nursing Units

Seaman, Christa

An Evaluation of Fatigue Management Strategies Implemented on Hospital Nursing Units Public Deposited

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March 19, 2019

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Seaman, Christa
- Affiliation: School of Nursing

Abstract

Nursing staff are often scheduled to work long shifts, rotate between day and night shifts, and work overtime to help hospitals ensure delivery of care to patients around the clock, as well as provide nurses work-life balance by giving them more "leisure" or free time away from work. These schedules, now commonplace in hospitals, may unfortunately result in fatigue and sleep deprivation among nurses, negatively affect their work performance by decreasing productivity at work, and, more importantly, make them prone to errors that negatively impact the delivery of safe, quality patient care. This project used a pretest-posttest design to evaluate the effects of fatigue management strategies (namely, duty free breaks, limiting consecutive hours worked, and limiting consecutive shifts) implemented on four adult medical or surgical units at one large academic medical center. Measures used in evaluating the strategies implemented included the Occupational Fatigue Exhaustion Recovery (OFER15) instrument (Winwood et al., 2006), the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) instrument (Buysse et al., 1989), medication administration record near miss alerts, absenteeism, and overtime. The major project findings included a significant decrease in reported acute fatigue and an increase in sleep quality among the nursing assistive personnel following the implementation of fatigue management strategies. Additionally, staff on one of the four intervention units reported a significant increase in inter-shift recovery and an improvement in sleep quality following the implementation of fatigue management strategies.

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