Workplace aggression as cause and effect: Emergency nurses’ experiences of working fatigued
Section snippets
Introduction and background/literature
Fatigue has the potential to affect nurses’ ability to provide safe and effective patient care as well as their health and quality of life outside of work. Nurses must be attentive enough not only to recognize their own potential for making errors, but also to identify and mitigate the errors of others [9]. Research findings connect some of the world’s worst disasters with fatigue: both the Chernobyl nuclear reactor catastrophe and the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster were linked to human
Methods
In this mixed-methods study, mixing occurred at the data-collection stage to provide a fuller exploration and more useful answers to the research questions. The overall aim of both arms of the study was to explore the effects of fatigue in emergency nurses on both cognition and work experience. The quantitative study [30] was an exploratory correlative design that used an online survey of emergency nurses (N = 1506) to explore the relationship between fatigue and cognitive function. The study
Results/discussion
Participants reported that consequences of working fatigued included inattentive, inefficient, and unsafe patient care (including both commission and omission errors), interpersonal conflicts (including lateral violence), emotional exhaustion and burnout, and low morale. The findings of this study support existing literature, bring several new and compelling factors to the understanding of work-related fatigue in emergency nurses, and draw new lines of association to other phenomena.
The
Conclusions
Fatigue as described by our sample of emergency nurses is an overwhelming mental and emotional exhaustion caused in part by overwork, extended shifts, and lack of breaks from the unpredictable demands typical of most ED settings. Participants made a clear distinction between “tiredness” as the consequence of a lack of sleep, and the mental and emotional fatigue that negatively effects the professional and personal environment. The high levels of fatigue reported by these emergency nurses
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge Leslie Gates for her assistance with this study, and the members of the Institute for Emergency Nursing Research Advisory Council (Michael D. Moon PhD, RN, CNS-CC, FAEN, Kathleen E. Zavotsky PhD, RN, Hershaw Davis, MSN, RN, and Anita Smith PhD, RN) for their review of this manuscript.
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