Joint Fatigue group win Workforce and Wellbeing Team of the Year at the BMJ Awards
Thursday 8 October 2020
Last night at the BMJ Awards 2020, the joint Fatigue group were honoured as Workforce and Wellbeing Team of the Year. With a membership spanning the Association of Anaesthetists, Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA), Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine and representation from the Royal College of Nursing and expert sleep physicians, the group are changing the culture about fatigue and managing night shift work.
Every other safety critical industry has a formal Fatigue Risk Management Strategy, and this group believe that healthcare should have the same.
Every other safety critical industry has a formal Fatigue Risk Management Strategy, and this group believe that healthcare should have the same. They have worked with the GMC, who now ask questions about fatigue and rest facilities in their annual trainer and trainee surveys, the Scottish government, who have adopted it as policy and the RCoA who use the rest facilities and culture standards the group developed for their ACSA departmental accreditation. The educational resources have had over 2000 unique downloads and have been adapted and adopted in countries such as Australia and Brazil. But, most importantly, the #FightFatigue campaign is the trigger for many departments throughout the UK getting proper rest facilities - so important during the Covid pandemic.
Key achievements of the joint Fatigue group:
Awareness raising:
• Support for the #FightFatigue campaign continues to grow.
• Over 30 publications having Altmetric impact factors in the top 5% of all research outputs.
• Trainee paper awarded second prize in the Anaesthesia journal paper of the year 2017.
• Consultant paper awarded fourth place in the Anaesthesia journal paper of the year 2019
Education:
• Over 2,000 resource packs provided plus 1,983 downloads
• Over 100 talks given by the team to trainees and consultants, Royal Colleges and Associations, Trusts, Deaneries, the National Association of Clinical Tutors, and Conference of Postgraduate Medical Deans.
GMC National Training Survey results for trainee anaesthetists (2019):
• 47% received education on fatigue and sleep, a 10% increase from 2018. 74% found it useful
• 31% felt too tired to get home safely monthly or more frequently (7.8% daily or weekly), a slight improvement from 2018 (34%; 8.6% respectively).
• 72% considered the support they received to take breaks good or very good, compared with 66% in 2018.
The group contributed a case study to the GMC National Training Survey 2018 report.
#FightFatigue is referenced in the 2019 GMC report “Caring for doctors, caring for patients”.