Emergency medical services (EMS) personnel have “widespread” issues with fatigue. So scientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have developed guidelines to combat the problem in order to reduce medical errors and risk of injury.
Among their recommendations were expanding the use of surveys on fatigue and sleepiness among EMS workers and limiting workers’ shifts to less than 24 hours.
“Administrators of EMS organizations are not sufficiently equipped to address fatigue in the workplace, in part because of the absence of guidelines for fatigue risk management in the EMS setting," said Daniel Patterson, PhD, lead author and assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Pitt School of Medicine.
Some of the recommendations were adopted despite the study's panel determining there was weak evidence to support their effectiveness. For example, concerns were raised that sleepiness surveys could be manipulated either to avoid work or avoid losing overtime hours, but the authors decided more could be gained by using some unreliable survey data than by ignoring it entirely.
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John joined TriMed in 2016, focusing on healthcare policy and regulation. After graduating from Columbia College Chicago, he worked at FM News Chicago and Rivet News Radio, and worked on the state government and politics beat for the Illinois Radio Network. Outside of work, you may find him adding to his never-ending graphic novel collection.