Applied ergonomics
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Historical Article
Remembering Ben-Tzion Karsh's scholarship, impact, and legacy.
Dr. Ben-Tzion (Bentzi) Karsh was a mentor, collaborator, colleague, and friend who profoundly impacted the fields of human factors and ergonomics (HFE), medical informatics, patient safety, and primary care, among others. ⋯ Karsh's most cited works, commenting on the particular ways they impacted our academic community; and lastly, through quotes from collaborators and mentees, illustrating Dr. Karsh's long-lasting impact on his contemporaries and students.
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Driver sleepiness contributes to traffic accidents. However, sleepiness in urban public transport remains an understudied subject. To fill this gap, we examined the sleepiness, sleep, and on-duty sleepiness countermeasures (SCMs) in 23 tram drivers working morning, day, and evening shifts for three weeks. ⋯ TST between days off averaged 7 h but was 1 h 33 min and 38 min shorter prior to morning and day shifts, respectively. The use of effective SCMs showed little variance between shift types. These results highlight the need for fatigue management in non-night-working tram drivers.
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Observational Study
Workflow disruptions and provider situation awareness in acute care: An observational study with emergency department physicians and nurses.
The fast-paced and rapidly changing environment of an Emergency Department (ED) requires providers to have a high level of situation awareness (SA). However, acute clinical care also encompasses a multitude of interruption-laden work processes that might degrade SA. It is therefore important to understand how frequent interruptions affect ED provider cognition in general and SA in particular. ⋯ Frequent workflow interruptions can degrade ED providers' situation awareness. A deeper understanding of how avoidable and unavoidable interruptions affect provider cognitions with particular focus on social and technology-related disruptions is required. Further emphasis should be placed on the effective application of work re-design in this context to foster safe and efficient patient care.
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Personas can be used to understand patterns of variation in patients' performance of cognitive work, particularly self-care decision making. In this study, we used a patient-centered cognitive task analysis (P-CTA) to develop self-care decision-making personas. We collected data from 24 older adults with chronic heart failure and 14 support persons, using critical incident and fictitious scenario interviews. ⋯ The Researching persona seeks information to gain better understanding, invents strategies, and conducts experiments independently or with clinicians. The Disengaging persona does not actively seek rules or information and does not attempt to reduce uncertainty or conduct experiments. We discuss the situational nature of personas, their use in design, and the benefits of P-CTA for studying patient decision making.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Effectiveness of the multi-component dynamic work intervention to reduce sitting time in office workers - Results from a pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial.
Prolonged sitting, which is highly prevalent in office workers, has been associated with several health risks. The aim of this study was to evaluate the Dynamic Work intervention by determining its effect on total sitting time at the 8-month follow-up in comparison to the control. ⋯ NCT03115645.