Do too many distractions affect nursing care?
The acute care hospital environment is filled with numerous distractions. Within this environment, professional nurses make clinical judgments about their patients, whose conditions may change minute by minute. As a result, nurses constantly organize and reorganize the priorities and tasks of care to accommodate patients’ fluctuating status. AHRQ researchers describe an ongoing research study aimed at exploring the effect of interruptions on the cognitive work of nursing. By combining human factors techniques and qualitative observation of nurses in practice, researchers produced a cognitive pathway, a unique visual graphic that offers a perspective of the nature of nurses’ work and the effect of interruptions and cognitive load on omissions and errors in care. Project Title:Work Environment: Effects on Quality of Healthcare Research Area: WC AHRQ Grant: HS11983 Principal Investigator: Bradley Evanoff, M.D., M.P.H. Reference: Potter P, Wolf L, Boxerman S, Grayson D, Sledge J, Dunagan C
