Pharmacist Occupational Fatigue and Well-Being

My primary research interests are focused on the occupational well-being of the health care professional—namely the pharmacist. From my experiences as a pharmacy technician, student intern, and now new practitioner I am able to relate and conceptualize the struggles that these individuals face due to excessive demands in their work environment.

Through my coursework in Industrial and Systems Engineering, I have gained knowledge regarding organization and job design, provision of quality health care and outcomes, and patient safety principles. I surround myself with experts in pharmacy practice, fatigue, and health systems engineering to apply innovative and novel approaches to a profession I am extremely passionate about!

Specifically, I incorporated the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) framework into a conceptual model to understand how excessive demands in the work place (related to personal, organizational, and environmental factors, as well as required tasks and available tools/technology) impacted the pharmacist process and associated outcomes. In this model, outcomes are not just those of the employee (fatigue, burnout), but also those of the patient (medication errors), and organization (job turnover). I utilized this conceptual model to create an instrument and conducted the first survey aimed at describing occupational fatigue in pharmacists. You can read more about that study here!

Since creating my pharmacist fatigue instrument, I conducted the first pilot study to capture physiologic (objective) and subjective fatigue data in pharmacists (a lot like a FitBit). This project was funded by the Midwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety-Education and Research Center Pilot Program Grant.

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