Impact of shift duration on alertness among air-medical emergency care clinician shift workers.

Background: Greater than half of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) shift workers report fatigue at work and most work long duration shifts. We sought to compare the alertness level of EMS shift workers by shift duration.

Methods: We used a multi-site, 14-day prospective observational cohort study design of EMS clinician shift workers at four air-medical EMS organizations.

Real-Time Fatigue Mitigation with Air-Medical Personnel: The SleepTrackTXT2 Randomized Trial.

The aims of this study were: 1) to determine the short-term impact of the SleepTrackTXT2 intervention on air-medical clinician fatigue during work shifts and 2) determine the longer-term impact on sleep quality over 120 days. We used a multi-site randomized controlled trial study design with a targeted enrollment of 100 (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02783027).

Fatigue mitigation with SleepTrackTXT2 in air medical emergency care systems: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Most air medical Emergency Medical Services (EMS) clinicians work extended duration shifts, and more than 50% report inadequate sleep, poor sleep quality, and/or poor recovery between shifts. The SleepTrackTXT pilot trial (ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02063737) showed that use of mobile phone text messages could impact EMS clinician self-reported fatigue and sleepiness during long duration shifts.

Real-time fatigue reduction in emergency care clinicians: The SleepTrackTXT randomized trial.

Background: We assessed performance characteristics and impact of a mobile phone text-message intervention for reducing intra-shift fatigue among emergency clinician shift workers.

Methods: We used a randomized controlled trial of 100 participants. All participants received text-message assessments at the start, every 4 hr during, and at end of scheduled shifts over a 90-day period.