The Effect of Increasing the Health Practitioner’s Workload on Patients and Their Safety

Abstract

The clinical healthcare system has been burdened due to various disease outbreak such as COVID 19 outbreak. Clinical Workloads on healthcare workers and practitioners lead to fatigue and mental exhaustions, causing medical errors. About 98 000 patients globally expires due to preventable medical errors in hospitals due to workload of health practitioners. (Philibert, et al., 2002) The majority of mistakes are made by well-meaning people operating under poor systems, procedures, or circumstances. The healthcare workers and physicians have been facing intense workloads due small workforce, physician working hours and financial pressures on hospitals and healthcare centers. However, very limited research has been conducted on association of workload of healthcare workers and safety of patients. Therefore, we aimed to design the systematic review on evaluation of effect of increasing the health practitioner’s workload on patients and their safety. To fulfill aims of study, we conducted a systematic review & meta-analysis by following “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)” (Selçuk, 2019) guidelines related to title which was “effect of increasing the health practitioner’s workload on patients and their safety”. About 5 databases were used for data search, collection and extraction include PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBSE, Cochrane library, and PsycInfo, on 2 November, 2022. To search data, we used MeSH keywords of “effect of workload on health practitioners”, “Healthcare workers workload” “its effects on patients’ safety, effect of workload on medical errors” “Mental stress among workers” and “patient safety” among all databases. Only those research articles were extracted that have been published during March 2020 to October 2022, keeping the COVID 19 pandemic in context. There were five qualitative studies that evaluated the value of psychological treatment for mental illness. Stress resulting from worries about infecting close relatives and anxiety and fear of getting infection worries about the health professionals were two interwoven elements in all five investigations. Our findings could be explained by an increase in resident physician workload that followed programmers’ elimination of 24-hour shifts. There is evidence to suggest that patient safety may suffer when healthcare workers and doctors care for more than more patients each day.