ABSTRACT
Doctors and nursing staff are well aware of the potential reduction in clinical performance as a result of sleep loss and fatigue. Mistakes may be made and treatment decisions inappropriately deferred. A further aspect of long work hours, prolonged night work, workload and stress effects is the potential for interaction effects upon work performance. Medicine has become even more of a 24-hour discipline. The admission and treatment of patients routinely at night has added to overall workload. Work is more intense because of a trend towards only admitting patients to hospital with serious conditions and discharging them sooner than was once the case. Workload is typically understood in terms of job demands, including the amount and type of work done and attendant time pressures. The simplest way to measure workload is self-reporting. Self-report measures are relatively easy to use and minimally invasive and are most accurate in measuring the number of tasks or amount of work being completed.
