PENINSULA FATIGUE RESEARCH GROUP
Busy rotas, training requirements, exams, and important life commitments mean that all doctors have experienced and likely have become accustomed to fatigue. Fatigue, however, is a factor that can affect our performance as doctors and change our risk of making errors, which may endanger our health, safety, and the outcomes of the patients we treat.
Fatigue accumulation is particularly likely over on-call long day and night shifts.
Our project aims to better understand fatigue accumulation over on-calls worked by anaesthetic registrars in the Peninsula deanery by collecting and comparing pre- and post- shift data from subjective and objective measures of fatigue. This data could be used to inform the development of a fatigue management system.
An initial pilot of a data collection tool was performed at Derriford in early 2025. The next steps will include rolling out this tool at other hospitals in the Peninsula deanery and refinement of the tool, for which the contributions of SWARM and its members will be essential.
