Grant: Project Grant

Excessive workload for nurses and healthcare aides (HCAs) is associated with negative health outcomes for both staff and patients. Burnout, driven by high workloads, affects over 71% of nurses with 26% of these leaving the profession. The healthcare sector has one of the highest rates of lost-time injuries. Quantifying workload, and critical effects like fatigue, in these complex settings is notoriously difficult. Fatigue is associated with increased risk of medical errors and accidents, placing both nurses and patients at risk: 1 in 10 of these accidents are life threatening and all could be avoided with workload management. We currently lack tools to quantify workload - and as managers say: "you can't manage what you can't measure" Our team of nurses, engineers, and human factors experts have developed a novel approach to creating task-by-task computer simulations of nursing work. These 'virtual care unit' models can quantify both nurse workload and patient care quality parameters over a full shift and can examine the effects of a wide range of design, patient, or policy changes quantitatively. This research team will develop virtual models of complex continuing care units to quantify staff workload, injury risk and fatigue over multiple shifts, as well as estimate its impact on care quality. Working directly with healthcare managers, we will explore the effects of unit-layout, unit design, and patient assignments and acuity, and staffing levels to measure how these impact workload, fatigue, and care quality. By working with an advisory committee, we will gain insights into how the developed modelling approach and outputs can better be adapted to address issues of importance to improve healthcare systems for both staff and patients. With healthcare systems under pressure to improve efficiency while maintaining care quality, quantitative tools like these pose the future for a more evidence based approach to managing and improving our healthcare systems.