Q&A: How Technician Fatigue Threatens Patient Safety, Care

Occupational fatigue among pharmacy technicians harms their health, increases safety risks, and contributes to burnout. It can lead to errors and impaired patient care, especially during long shifts. Fatigue also reduces organizational efficiency and raises turnover. Addressing this issue is crucial to protect technicians, enhance patient safety, and improve overall care quality.

Q&A: How Technician Fatigue Threatens Patient Safety, Care / New Africa - stock.adobe.com

Drug Topics recently sat down with Taylor Watterson, PharmD, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago Retzky College of Pharmacy, to discuss how distress experienced by pharmacy technicians can impact the overall safety and quality of pharmacy operations.

Drug Topics: How can distress experienced by pharmacy technicians impact the overall safety and quality of pharmacy operations?

Taylor Watterson, PharmD, PhD: The way that I like to conceptualize that specifically on 3 levels. You have the pharmacy technician level, you have the patient level, and then you have the larger organizational health care system level. At the pharmacy technician level, one of the main areas where we see that is obviously in their decreased well-being, but also in their safety. The work that I do is in occupational fatigue, and oftentimes we'll see that lead to burnout further down the line. I make the distinction between fatigue and burnout. Fatigue is your body's desire for rest, and that can be mental or physical. Burnout is this real mismatch between a person and their job manifesting as emotional exhaust, lack of personal accomplishment, and also depersonalization.

We can see these everyday stressors building up at the individual level and causing this long term, very chronic sense of disconnection, or burnout. That can lead to any number of things, such as increased turnover, also increased stress, increased acceleration of chronic conditions, trouble sleeping at night, worsening of heart conditions and cardiac conditions, increased GI symptoms, all of that. Within occupational fatigue, one of the areas that we're really concerned about is drowsiness after work, so risks for car accidents when driving on the way home. But also, we found for these individuals that can be increased risk of needle stick injuries, increased risk of injury or harm while they are at work. A lot of those very standard workplace safety initiatives kind of go out the window when you are experiencing a need for rest.

When we think about it at a patient level, occupational fatigue and limited well-being has real impacts and is a real risk to patient safety. Things like decreased reaction time and diagnosis time, increased risk for errors and potential safety risks in terms of clinical errors. Even things like decreased connection and patient experience. I often relate this to if you are a pharmacist or a pharmacy technician, you're on hour 12 of your workday, and for a whole bunch of good reasons, you just don't really feel like talking to anyone. For the patient that comes in at that hour, there is a very real chance that that interaction is going to be very different than if the patient that came in earlier in the morning.

Same thing with if you're filling a prescription at hour 12 versus if you're filling a prescription at hour 1. We can see that there's very real patient safety and patient quality impacts. Ultimately, thinking a little bit more broadly at the organization level, we have things like decreased quality, decreased efficiency, increased turnover, all of which funnels back into the system and enables us to provide care. There's really these kind of 3 tiers that we know this can impact. Obviously for our employees, the biggest one is the technician themselves and really emphasizing the need to address this issue.

READ MORE: How Pharmacy Technician Burnout Impacts Patient Care

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