Fatigue: What can we do?

We have been thinking about Fatigue in healthcare; Recently there have been a few significant reports and papers on this topic (HSSIB:  The impact of staff fatigue on patient safety and CIEHF: Fatigue risk management for health and social care | CIEHF (ergonomics.org.uk). These reports have a wealth of information and are well worth a read. A firm conclusion is that the evidence base for treating fatigue as a significant risk to patient safety is growing. When we discuss fatigue during our Human Factors training a couple of things stand out:

1. Nobody enjoys feeling fatigued(!) and most are worried about the impact it could have on their ability to work safely
2. Most staff feel it is “on them” and don’t recognise that there is much that can be done when we take a systems-based approach or SEIPS lens to fatigue
3. Most staff wouldn’t feel confident admitting to feeling fatigued if involved in an incident

We need to move away from thinking that fatigue is an individual problem for individuals to deal with and start thinking about fatigue with a system mindset:

Challenge yourself: Does your organisation have fatigue aware rota schedules? Is fatigue on your risk register? Do you prompt your patient safety investigators to consider fatigue and recognise staff fatigue as a system outcome, not an individual weakness? Do you provide adequate rest facilities and hydration / nutrition stations for frontline staff? Does your culture reward staying late and skipping breaks? Do you encourage naps during break periods? Do you consider fatigue when planning workload or allocating tasks? Do we look out for fatigue in our colleagues and have empathy for those impacted by fatigue? Do we ensure any new IT systems reduce workload and friction points? Do we provide enough high usability equipment to reduce workload?

We would love to hear how you are pushing back against fatigue!

Want to spread systems-based human factors thinking in your organisation? Want ready to go slide sets and toolkit to help you?

Join us in July! We learn more about fatigue, what causes it, the impact and what we can do about it. Plus many more modules such as SEIPS, stress, communication, situational awareness and incivility on our Human Factors Train-the-Trainer course

9^th & 10^th July

If you have a group of staff wanting to join contact us directly for easy invoicing and group discounts.