Effect of Fatigue on Regional Anaesthesia Task

NHS Trust

Status

Unknown

Conditions

Fatigue

Anesthesia

Treatments

Behavioral: Fatigue

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT04711499

20AN007

Details and patient eligibility

About

The adverse effects of sleep related fatigue are significant, impacting on doctors' health, wellbeing, performance and ultimately their safety and that of their patients'.

Trainees are at an increased risk of fatigue because they routinely, and are increasingly, working long hours, and exposed to excessive and high intensity workloads. With increasing numbers of patient consultations, there is a higher risk of making poorer quality clinical decisions (i.e. decision fatigue). The excessive workloads experienced by doctors can cause fatigue through the requirement for sustained attention over long periods of time, particularly when performing complex and mentally demanding tasks. Our main objective is to study the difference between the fatigued and non-fatigued state of anaesthetists and on their ability to perform an ultrasound-guided peripheral nerve blockade task. We hypothesise that fatigue will result in a clinically significant reduction in the objective structured assessment scores of anaesthetists who are performing an ultrasound-guided peripheral nerve blockade task compared to their scores when they are non-fatigued.

Enrollment

32 estimated patients

Sex

All

Ages

18 to 65 years old

Volunteers

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Anaesthetists of ST3 grade and above with previous experience of performing an ultrasound guided peripheral nerve block.

Exclusion criteria

Previous experience of gaze control training or eye-tracking software applied to medical interventions.
No previous experience of performing an ultrasound guided peripheral nerve block.

Trial design

Primary purpose

Screening

Allocation

Randomized

Interventional model

Crossover Assignment

Masking

Single Blind

32 participants in 2 patient groups

Fatigue Group

Experimental group

Description:

The trial will recruit trainee anaesthetists of ST3 grade or higher who take part in a resident night-shift rota at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. Participants will undergo baseline psychometric testing to measure baseline mood. There will be a series of questions to ascertain levels of fatigue. All participants will then be asked to perform a standardised ultrasound-guided peripheral nerve blockade task using a high fidelity bench-top phantom model. Performance in this task will be independently assessed using a previously-validated scoring tool by two raters blinded to participant group allocation.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Fatigue

Non Fatigued group

Active Comparator group

Description:

The non fatigued group will be asked to perform the same series of questions and tasks after a night at home with no work duties or commitments

Treatment:

Behavioral: Fatigue