Abstract
In a simulated monitoring situation, 21 anesthesia residents were tested for their ability to detect significant changes in four critical variables in the presence of a concurrent distraction. Each resident was tested after a night without clinical responsibility, (rested) and after 24 hours of in-house call (fatigued). When fatigued, the residents scored significantly worse on the vigilance test than when rested (57.2 ±15.4 versus 65.9 ± 10.9,P < 0.02). Despite the small population size, the possibility of subject and investigator bias, and the artificial setting, these results support the intuitive proposition that a fatigued person is less likely than a rested person to detect important changes in monitored variables.
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Denisco, R.A., Drummond, J.N. & Gravenstein, J.S. The effect of fatigue on the performance of a simulated anesthetic monitoring task. J Clin Monitor Comput 3, 22–24 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00770879
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00770879