Annals of Surgery

An international research team, including the University of Granada, has taken seriously the importance that has to know the level of fatigue of the resident doctors, for this reason it has been shown that it is possible to objectively detect the fatigue that the resident doctors have after a shift through saccadic movements (rapid eye movements, fundamentally voluntary, that we use to direct our gaze to an object that attracts our attention) of their eyes, which are used to fix attention.

The research, published in the prestigious journal Annals of Surgery, presents the evaluation of the resident physicians of the Trauma Service of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix (Texas, United States) before and after the so-called “call-day” (on-call day in which they spend 24 working hours without sleep).

In any case, it must be taken into account that fatigue did not affect a medical practice that was carried out later in the study, so the researchers warn that the relationship between medical errors and professional fatigue is complex.