Occupational therapists' experience of workplace fatigue: Issues and action

Abstract

Background: Occupational therapists (OTs) work in all areas of health and wellbeing. The work is physically and psychologically demanding, but OTs are often not diligent about recognizing and attending to the workplace health and safety issue of fatigue in their own work settings.

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to determine current issues and the evidence-base as presented in the literature so as to develop awareness and best practice interventions for fatigue reduction and management in occupational therapists' workplace.

Methods: A comprehensive search strategy was carried out by the medical librarian on the study team and themes were extracted from the relevant literature by the study team.

Results: The literature revealed little research directly addressing occupational therapy workplace fatigue and we expanded our review of the evidence-base across all healthcare workers to identify publications of particular relevance to occupational therapists.

Conclusion: This background paper is an important first step to raising awareness among OTs, guide key stakeholders regarding contributing factors to, and consequences of, OTs' workplace fatigue, and set research direction. Knowing which factors influencing workplace fatigue are shared across healthcare professionals and which are unique to OTs can also help organizations develop more tailored workplace fatigue risk reduction programs. This review concludes with a list of existing guidelines and tools for developing workplace fatigue risk assessment and management programs relevant to occupational therapists.

Keywords: Work-related injury; burnout; healthcare professional; occupation; psychological health.