Presenter

Dr. Steege’s program of research addresses fatigue risk management in nursing work systems. Given the challenges with directly measuring worker fatigue using subjective or objective measures in healthcare settings, there is a need to explore passive measurement opportunities. Passive monitoring does not require any participation from the worker, which reduces burden, and has been used to assess fatigue in other industries. Healthcare organizations have been referred to as “data rich”; there are a wide variety of data being routinely captured that relate to nurses’ work demands such as patient acuity levels, numbers of pages, scheduling information, and staffing ratios, and which can potentially be used to predict fatigue and monitor changes in fatigue levels in nearly real-time. Dr. Steege will discuss findings from current research on predicting nurse work strain and fatigue using data collected through passive monitoring approaches and opportunities for extending this to facilitate more robust safety management in healthcare organizations.