Recovery Napping Protocol for Anesthesiologist Performance

Overview

Sleep deprivation impacts performance of shift workers in health care. Anesthesiologists are a population at risk that endures stressful situations and changing working hours. The decreased performance could be the cause for undesirable events. Power-napping is known to be an efficient technique to mitigate the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation and is a feasible measure to implement in critical care units. Still there are few insights that measure the clinical relevance in the field. With the high-fidelity simulations this study is able to measure clinical performance and test for those effects. Therefore we propose a prospective, monocentric study to evaluate a power-napping protocol (less than 30min)

Residents in anesthesiology will be recruited on voluntary basis. They will pass the high fidelity simulation twice, once as a baseline measure under normal conditions after a typical night at home and once sleep deprived after a night shift. BASELINE Participants will wear actigraphy bracelets to define their sleep pattern for 2 weeks, Then they will spent a normal night at home before coming to the performance center in the afternoon (13h to18h). There they will respond to questions about stress and sleep, will be equipped with smart shirts (HEXOSKIN) to measure their level of stress during the performance, and then undertake a crisis simulation. Afterwards they pass some standardized cognitive tests. TRAINING The whole year group of residents will be trained to understand sleep management and learn power napping. After the workshop they will individually be trained during 2 weeks including some follow up calls. INTERVENTION The participants carry again actigraphy bracelets. Then they work a night shift in their service where they usually sleep less than four hours. The morning after the shift participants are free to spend how the like while sleep is being controlled with actigraphy bracelets. In the afternoon (13 to 18h) they return for the second time to the performance center. They are randomly assigned to a napping or non napping group and equipped with ambulatory ECG (Hexoskin) as well es ambulatory EEG (Somfit). After the intervention period (nap or leisure time) they proceed with the same performance measures as at baseline including a simulation crisis and computerized cognitive tests.