Fatigue as it Affects Nursing

: Editor's note: From its first issue in 1900 through to the present day, AJN has unparalleled archives detailing nurses' work and lives over more than a century. These articles not only chronicle nursing's growth as a profession within the context of the events of the day, but they also reveal prevailing societal attitudes about women, health care, and human rights. Today's nursing school curricula rarely include nursing's history, but it's a history worth knowing. To this end, From the AJN Archives highlights articles selected to fit today's topics and times.In this month's article from the January 1935 issue, Lillian M. Gilbreth, a highly respected psychologist and industrial engineer, examines the problem of fatigue in nursing. A nonnurse expert, Gilbreth notes the negative effects of fatigue on skills, a problem "enormously more serious when the product of the work is human comfort and sometimes even human life, as it often is with the work of the nurse." In their article in this issue, "Health Care Worker Fatigue," Lea Anne Gardner and Deborah Dubeck of the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority share examples of fatigue-related adverse events and discuss the need for both personal and institutional fatigue risk management strategies.