Healthcare staff fatigue: The unrecognised risk for patient safety

Fatigue among NHS staff is rarely acknowledged as a risk to the quality of healthcare delivery and patient safety. Other safety-critical industries have systematic approaches to managing and accounting for the known risks of staff fatigue within their organisations. These provide individual staff with clear expectations, and require an organisation-wide approach to fatigue risk management and national oversight by a regulatory framework. Fatigue in health and social care is not managed in the same way. This paper describes why fatigue is a risk to patient safety and the core components of fatigue risk management systems, and includes reflections from the authors' experiences in healthcare. This paper makes the case for healthcare organisations to acknowledge and seek to pragmatically manage the risk of fatigue among healthcare staff to support patient safety.