Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this randomized trial comparing ACGME duty-hour policies with more flexible policies for surgical residents, the flexible policies resulted in noninferior patient outcomes and no significant difference in residents' satisfaction with overall well-being and education quality. In response to concerns about patient safety and resident well-being, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) introduced national regulations in 2003 that limited resident duty periods to 80 hours per week, capped overnight shift lengths, and mandated minimum time off between shifts. 1 , 2 Concerns persisted, 3 and in 2011, the ACGME implemented further restrictions to shorten maximum shift lengths for interns and increase time off after overnight on-call duty for residents. 1 , 4 , 5 Although most observers agree that some duty-hour regulation was necessary, critics cite a weak evidence base for the 2003 and 2011 reforms. 3 , 6 , 7 Several retrospective . . .

In this cluster-randomized trial involving 63 internal-medicine residency programs governed by either the 2011 ACGME duty-hour rules or more flexible duty-hour rules, flexible duty-hour policies did not increase 30-day mortality or adversely affect several other patient safety outcomes.

Background The completeness of hospital discharge summaries may reflect the overall quality of inter-professional communications. The effect of reducing resident workload on clinical performance is largely unknown. Objective We examined the impact of reducing housestaff workload on the quality of discharge summaries, an indicator of clinical performance, as compared to discharge summaries created by trainees on a team with a more typical workload. Design Patients admitted to a medicine service at a community teaching hospital affiliated with an academic medical center were alternately allocated between a control and intervention care team of residents. First-year residents on the intervention team carried an average census of 3.5 patients compared with 6.6 patients for peers on the control team. A random selection of 142 discharge summaries from a 3-month period were blindly evaluated using a structured tool based on professional documentation standards. Participants 61 internal medicine residents. Main Results Inter-rater reliability of discharge summary quality was 0.9. Discharge summaries produced by residents on the intervention team with a reduced workload had significantly more of the required elements (74 vs 65%, p < 0.001). Intervention team summaries were more frequently complete and contained significantly more of the required elements describing the patient history (65.7% vs 36.1%, p = 0.0005), the inpatient narrative (47.1% vs 22.2%, p = 0.003), discharge planning (20.0% vs 5.5%, p = 0.012), and continuity of care (24.3% vs 6.9%, p = 0.005). Fewer than a quarter of the summaries reviewed included discharge instructions, information on follow-up care, or a discharge medication list. Conclusions Reducing resident workload can significantly improve discharge summary quality, a measure of resident performance.

Patient monitoring is indispensable in any operating room to follow the patient's current health state based on measured physiological parameters. Reducing workload helps to free cognitive resources and thus influences human performance, which ultimately improves the quality of care. Among the many methods available to assess perceived workload, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) provides the most widely accepted tool. However, only few studies have investigated the validity of the NASA-TLX in the health care sector. This study aimed to validate a modified version of the raw NASA-TLX in patient monitoring tasks by investigating its correspondence with expected lower and higher workload situations and its robustness against nonworkload-related covariates. This defines criterion validity. In this pooled analysis, we evaluated raw NASA-TLX scores collected after performing patient monitoring tasks in four different investigator-initiated, computer-based, prospective, multicenter studies. All of them were conducted in three hospitals with a high standard of care in central Europe. In these already published studies, we compared conventional patient monitoring with two newly developed situation awareness-oriented monitoring technologies called Visual Patient and Visual Clot. The participants were resident and staff anesthesia and intensive care physicians, and nurse anesthetists with completed specialization qualification. We analyzed the raw NASA-TLX scores by fitting mixed linear regression models and univariate models with different covariates. We assessed a total of 1160 raw NASA-TLX questionnaires after performing specific patient monitoring tasks. Good test performance and higher self-rated diagnostic confidence correlated significantly with lower raw NASA-TLX scores and the subscores (all P<.001). Staff physicians rated significantly lower workload scores than residents (P=.001), whereas nurse anesthetists did not show any difference in the same comparison (P=.83). Standardized distraction resulted in higher rated total raw NASA-TLX scores (P<.001) and subscores. There was no gender difference regarding perceived workload (P=.26). The new visualization technologies Visual Patient and Visual Clot resulted in significantly lower total raw NASA-TLX scores and all subscores, including high self-rated performance, when compared with conventional monitoring (all P<.001). This study validated a modified raw NASA-TLX questionnaire for patient monitoring tasks. The scores obtained correctly represented the assumed influences of the examined covariates on the perceived workload. We reported high criterion validity. The NASA-TLX questionnaire appears to be a reliable tool for measuring subjective workload. Further research should focus on its applicability in a clinical setting.

Background Although alert fatigue is blamed for high override rates in contemporary clinical decision support systems, the concept of alert fatigue is poorly defined. We tested hypotheses arising from two possible alert fatigue mechanisms: (A) cognitive overload associated with amount of work, complexity of work, and effort distinguishing informative from uninformative alerts, and (B) desensitization from repeated exposure to the same alert over time. Methods Retrospective cohort study using electronic health record data (both drug alerts and clinical practice reminders) from January 2010 through June 2013 from 112 ambulatory primary care clinicians. The cognitive overload hypotheses were that alert acceptance would be lower with higher workload (number of encounters, number of patients), higher work complexity (patient comorbidity, alerts per encounter), and more alerts low in informational value (repeated alerts for the same patient in the same year). The desensitization hypothesis was that, for newly deployed alerts, acceptance rates would decline after an initial peak. Results On average, one-quarter of drug alerts received by a primary care clinician, and one-third of clinical reminders, were repeats for the same patient within the same year. Alert acceptance was associated with work complexity and repeated alerts, but not with the amount of work. Likelihood of reminder acceptance dropped by 30% for each additional reminder received per encounter, and by 10% for each five percentage point increase in proportion of repeated reminders. The newly deployed reminders did not show a pattern of declining response rates over time, which would have been consistent with desensitization. Interestingly, nurse practitioners were 4 times as likely to accept drug alerts as physicians. Conclusions Clinicians became less likely to accept alerts as they received more of them, particularly more repeated alerts. There was no evidence of an effect of workload per se, or of desensitization over time for a newly deployed alert. Reducing within-patient repeats may be a promising target for reducing alert overrides and alert fatigue.

Burnout is a global work-related phenomenon. Intensive care unit (ICU) nurses are at risk of burnout and the COVID-19 pandemic may increase this risk. The objectives of this study were to assess the prevalence of burnout risk and identify risk factors among ICU nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Web-based survey performed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in French speaking Belgium. Risk of burnout was assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventory scale. A total of 1135 ICU nurses responded to the questionnaire. The overall prevalence of burnout risk was 68%. A total of 29% of ICU nurses were at risk of depersonalisation (DP), 31% of reduced personal accomplishment (PA), and 38% of emotional exhaustion (EE). A 1:3 nurse-to-patient ratio increased the risk of EE (OR = 1.77, 95% CI: 1.07–2.95) and DP (OR = 1.38, 95% CI: 1.09–2.40). Those who reported having a higher perceived workload during the COVID-19 pandemic were at higher risk for all dimensions of burnout. Shortage of personal protective equipment increased the risk of EE (OR = 1.78, 95% CI: 1.35–3.34) and nurses who reported having symptoms of COVID-19 without being tested were at higher risk of EE (OR = 1.40, 95% CI: 1.68–1.87). Two-thirds of ICU nurses were at risk of burnout and this risk was associated with their working conditions during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We recommend monitoring the risk of burnout and implementing interventions to prevent and manage it, taking into account the factors identified in this study.

Internal medicine residency programs were randomly assigned to standard duty-hour policies or to flexible policies without limits on shift length and time off. Interns in programs with flexible policies did not have a superior educational experience.

Background The purpose of the present study was to develop and validate a multidimensional, surgery-specific workload measure (the SURG-TLX), and to determine its utility in providing diagnostic information about the impact of various sources of stress on the perceived demands of trained surgical operators. As a wide range of stressors have been identified for surgeons in the operating room, the current approach of considering stress as a unidimensional construct may not only limit the degree to which underlying mechanisms may be understood but also the degree to which training interventions may be successfully matched to particular sources of stress. Methods The dimensions of the SURG-TLX were based on two current multidimensional workload measures and developed via focus group discussion. The six dimensions were defined as mental demands, physical demands, temporal demands, task complexity, situational stress, and distractions. Thirty novices were trained on the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) peg transfer task and then completed the task under various conditions designed to manipulate the degree and source of stress experienced: task novelty, physical fatigue, time pressure, evaluation apprehension, multitasking, and distraction. Results The results were supportive of the discriminant sensitivity of the SURG-TLX to different sources of stress. The sub-factors loaded on the relevant stressors as hypothesized, although the evaluation pressure manipulation was not strong enough to cause a significant rise in situational stress. Conclusions The present study provides support for the validity of the SURG-TLX instrument and also highlights the importance of considering how different stressors may load surgeons. Implications for categorizing the difficulty of certain procedures, the implementation of new technology in the operating room (man–machine interface issues), and the targeting of stress training strategies to the sources of demand are discussed. Modifications to the scale to enhance clinical utility are also suggested.

Background: There are no objective measurement methods that provide empirical data on nursing workload. Aim: This study aimed to develop a system to measure nursing workload using beacons and a smartphone based on the real‐time location information. Methods: This was a study of the technological development of a system for measuring nursing workload using beacons and smartphones. The validation of the system developed was performed by assessing the recognition rate of beacons by multiple walk‐through tests and determining the optimal number of beacons and smartphones for a higher recognition rate of beacons. Results: The system consisted of four components: data‐generation devices, nurse devices, servers, and databases. The location information generated from beacons is stored in nurses’ smartphones. Then, these data were then transmitted from the smartphone to the server and stored in a server database. As a result of system validation, the optimal recognition rate of the beacon through the smartphone was determined as 97.5% and 96.2% with 12 beacons and 15 beacons, respectively, in one smartphone. The higher the number of beacons and smartphones employed in the system developed, the lower the recognition rates were. Conclusions and Implications for Nursing: The system developed in this study for measuring nursing workload is highly accurate in providing nurses’ real‐time location information. Thus, this system could be utilized to measure the nursing workload objectively because it provides the real‐time location information, moving path, and distance of nurses during work.