Abstract
Although nursing is physically and mentally strenuous, only a few studies have been done to find the impacts of the fatigue level and nursing workflow corresponding to major healthcare activities in an intensive care unit (ICU). To address this need, the current study aims to understand the relationships among the key nursing activities that impact their fatigue levels in ICU. Nurses’ time-study and real-time location data have been used to develop a simulation model in two different periods: February to March 2020 and July 2020. Two Hierarchical Task Analysis charts were developed from the collected data, one for each period, and used as the foundation for the fatigue-recovery simulation model. Different scenarios of all nursing activities’ frequencies (number of conducted tasks during a shift) and task sequences (number of times tasks are conducted continuously prior to a break) were simulated in order to understand their impact on nurses’ predicted average fatigue level reached in a shift. According to the results, the performing procedure, patient care, and peer support activities stand out as the most crucial drivers for fatigue during a nurse shift in an ICU.
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de Oliveira Vargas, V., Kim, J.H., Despins, L., Kasaie, A. (2022). Simulation Model to Understand Nurses’ Fatigue Level in an Intensive Care Unit. In: Duffy, V.G. (eds) Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management. Health, Operations Management, and Design. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13320. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06018-2_12
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