Two Minds Blog

I'm one of the authors on a new study by Dr. Mustafa Ozkaynak's research team, which looks at how emergency department (ED) nurses change their decision-making process when they become fatigued. In a previous paper , we found that fatigue was common in ED nurses, particularly toward the end of their work shift, and that nurses' fatigue was more often characterized as physical rather than mental or emotional -- in other words, this really represented being physically tired  at the end of the day, not being burned-out or depressed. Nevertheless, physical fatigue has important effects on nurses' decision-making in the ED. Based on nurses' qualitative reports, fatigue has mixed effects on their clinical performance. Nurses said that they definitely cut corners when they were tired, for example in terms of documentation in the electronic health record. They felt that they were less careful about double-checking things, and might be more likely to make snap decisions. We...

Vaccines have emerged as a hot topic for Federal policy-making this year -- in particular, the positions and beliefs that last year would have been called "vaccine hesitancy" -- and that's the topic I am revisiting this week. Accordingly, t his seems like a good time to state that I write this blog as an individual scholar and a concerned American citizen, not directly as part of my faculty assignment at the University of Colorado. (Nobody in academia will be surprised that what actually counts for my annual review is peer-reviewed journal articles, and that public-facing communication is viewed as a potential distraction!) I greatly appreciate the university as an environment for my research, and the laws of the Regents of the University of Colorado that support free speech and academic freedom. But it's also important to note that my writing here is separate from my teaching and my funded research programs, and in no way reflects any official position of the univers...