Physicians Performance After Night Shifts

Emergency medicine is one of the professional activities integrating a night activity into working time. Concerns about the sleep deprivation that this activity generates have been growing for the past thirty years. However, at present, the pace - duration and repetition - of this activity does not yet seem to be optimized, and therefore continues to be the subject of questions in terms of safety of care and quality of life at work. One of the peculiarities of emergency medicine is that doctors have to work in a crisis situation. A situation is qualified as critical for a patient when his state of health is unstable, and with an evolution which can be rapidly pejorative. Crisis situations are at the heart of the emergency room profession, and due to their potential seriousness for the patients, it must be managed in all circumstances. To cope with a crisis situation, a doctor needs to be efficient. However, performance calls for two types of skills: technical skills on one hand, and non-technical skills on the other. This study therefore aims to answer the following question: are the non-technical skills of emergency physicians in the management of a crisis situation affected twenty-four hours after the end of a night shift? The study assesses the performance of emergency physicians via complex simulations at two time frames : 24h after a night shift (the post recovery performance simulation) and another time were the participant did not have night shifts in less than 3 nights (usual performance simulation).

Inclusion Criteria: * be an emergency doctor with an emergency medicine capacity, * work full time in the emergency medicine center of the Toulouse University Hospital * on call in at least one of the emergency reception services of the Toulouse University Hospital * to have given his non-opposition to participate and his authorization of right to his image and his voice within the framework of the research Exclusion Criteria: * non-emergency doctor * emergency doctor not on call in at least one of the emergency services of the Toulouse University Hospital * professional with a declared personal or professional conflict with one of the members of the group