Hospital staff are set to benefit from a new study that aims
to help them manage the tiredness and fatigue they experience when working
night shifts.
The Health Foundation has awarded £56,000 to Northumbria
University, Newcastle and the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation
Trust to find new ways to support staff working night shifts on the labour
wards.
Many night shift staff report how fatigue can have an impact
on how well they are able to do their job, as well as on their physical health
and psychological wellbeing.
The researchers will work closely with midwives, doctors,
nurses, operating department practitioners and healthcare assistants in the
Royal Victoria Infirmary, exploring and testing better ways to help people to
manage their sleep and fatigue during long night shifts.
Dr Nancy Redfern, Consultant Anaesthetist and project lead
at Newcastle Hospitals said: “The labour ward can be a busy place at night, and
however hard we try, tiredness affects everyone’s performance. We hope that by
using ideas from the whole team of midwives, nurses and doctors that we can
develop a way of managing their night shift fatigue in a way that genuinely
improves staff wellbeing and morale. It will be good for patients and good for
the whole team.”
The researchers will provide staff with wearable activity
monitors and an app specially developed by Sleep and Fatigue Research to help
people monitor their sleep wake patterns and predict how their fatigue will
affect them over the next 20 hours.
They will also hold focus groups, interviews and ask staff
to complete wellbeing questionnaires to understand people’s experiences of
night shift tiredness. It is hoped that solutions developed in partnership will
improve team working at night and enable breaks and powernaps to be built into
workers’ schedules.
Dr Alison Steven, Reader in Health Professions Education in Northumbria
University’s Department of Nursing, Midwifery and Health, is leading the research team at
Northumbria. She said: “This innovative action research project will enable
both organisations and ward teams to work together using a participatory
approach to co-design a new strategy to manage the risk of fatigue in theatre
and obstetric teams. We hope that this approach may improve decision-making, the
management of emergencies, patient and staff safety and staff morale.”
Speaking about her own experiences of working nightshift, trainee
anaesthetist Dr Roopa McCrossan said: “We work from 8.00pm to 8.30am on night
shift. The nature of the job means taking breaks overnight can be difficult. As
anaesthetists we deal with many unpredictable emergencies, such as trauma
calls, cardiac arrest calls and urgent caesarean sections.
“This project has huge potential to improve staff and
patient safety in the hospital overnight. Alerting clinical staff to when they
are critically fatigued allows the whole team to take action. In the longer
term, the project will allow us to modify rotas to shift patterns that are less
likely to cause high levels of fatigue amongst staff.”
Dr Kirstie Anderson, a sleep expert at the Newcastle
Hospitals, is supporting the project. She said “All our staff need the best
sleep possible to care for patients’ day and night.
“Tiredness affects everyone’s performance and can impact
quality of care and patient safety. Our vigilance becomes more variable; we may
be less good at logical reasoning, less empathetic and more prone to make
errors. Other safety critical industries such as airlines, nuclear and
petrochemical companies have formal fatigue risk management strategies – we
need them in healthcare as well.”
The funding has been awarded as part of The Health
Foundation’s Innovating for Improvement programme. The Health Foundation is an
independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care
for people in the UK. Its Innovating for Improvement programme aims to improve
the delivery of health and social care, as well as helping people to manage
their own health care by redesigning processes and practices.
Sarah Henderson, Assistant Director of Improvement
Programmes at The Health Foundation added: “We’re excited to support this
project – one of 23 that have been developed by frontline teams to improve
health and social care across the UK. We are looking forward to working with
the teams to develop their innovative ideas, put them into practice and gather
evidence about how their projects are improving care for patients.
The project will run for 15 months from January 2019. It
forms part of Northumbria University’s research into integrated health and social care which explores new, sustainable and effective
ways of promoting health and wellbeing across all age groups.
