Faculty mentor/PI email address
jim010@aol.com
Is your research Teaching and Learning based?
1
Keywords
hydration; emergency medicine; cognitive performance; shift work; physician well-being; human factors; systems design
Date of Presentation
5-6-2026 12:00 AM
Poster Abstract
Emergency Medicine (EM) clinicians work prolonged, cognitively demanding shifts in environments characterized by unpredictability, interruptions, and high decision density. While fatigue, burnout, and circadian disruption have been widely studied, hydration during active clinical shifts has received little focused attention. Evidence from cognitive, military, and sports physiology literature demonstrates that even mild dehydration can impair attention, working memory, mood, and reaction time. Despite these findings, hydration in Emergency Medicine is typically treated as an individual behavior rather than a systems-level design consideration. This review synthesizes relevant physiologic and performance literature, identifies cultural and structural barriers to hydration during EM shifts, and proposes a reframing of hydration as a modifiable systems variable. The analysis supports the development of a structured survey instrument to assess hydration planning, barriers, and behavioral patterns among residents and attending physicians, with future potential for targeted quality improvement interventions.
Disciplines
Emergency Medicine | Medicine and Health Sciences
Included in
Hydration During Emergency Medicine Shifts: An Overlooked Component of Cognitive Performance, Well-Being, and Systems Design To fail to plan for shift hydration is to plan to fail with shift hydration
Emergency Medicine (EM) clinicians work prolonged, cognitively demanding shifts in environments characterized by unpredictability, interruptions, and high decision density. While fatigue, burnout, and circadian disruption have been widely studied, hydration during active clinical shifts has received little focused attention. Evidence from cognitive, military, and sports physiology literature demonstrates that even mild dehydration can impair attention, working memory, mood, and reaction time. Despite these findings, hydration in Emergency Medicine is typically treated as an individual behavior rather than a systems-level design consideration. This review synthesizes relevant physiologic and performance literature, identifies cultural and structural barriers to hydration during EM shifts, and proposes a reframing of hydration as a modifiable systems variable. The analysis supports the development of a structured survey instrument to assess hydration planning, barriers, and behavioral patterns among residents and attending physicians, with future potential for targeted quality improvement interventions.