RESEARCH
CLINICAL WORKFLOWS / PUBLISHED
Understanding Cognitive Load in Nursing Workflows
How might interfaces help nurses recover context when work is interrupted?
Sandra Osaretin · Secondary-research note · Related project: NurseAid
An investigation in progress.
This note connects selected published research with the questions behind NurseAid. It is a focused reading of existing sources and project material, not a systematic review or a completed study with nurses.
No reduction in workload, clinical errors or patient harm has been demonstrated by the NurseAid prototype.
01 / Where the question started
Information can be present and still be difficult to act on.
NurseAid began with personal hospital observation and informal conversation with a nurse friend in Canada. Those discovery inputs prompted questions about fragmented information, interruptions and recovery. They are not formal interview findings.
The design question is narrower than “How do we reduce workload?” It asks what information should remain visible, what state should be preserved, and how someone knows where to resume.
02 / How this note was assembled
Read the evidence. Make the interpretation explicit.
Two publications already cited in the NurseAid PRD were checked through their PubMed abstracts. Their reported methods and conclusions are summarized below, then translated into provisional design questions. Full-text appraisal and a broader search remain next steps.
03 / What the selected evidence reports
Shan et al. · BMC Nursing · 2023
Across 145 shift observations in one tertiary hospital, the researchers recorded interruptions during EHR tasks and assessed workload. Their model linked task time, task difficulty and system usability with mental workload.
Boundary: an observational study in one setting does not establish that a mobile dashboard will reduce workload in Canadian nursing practice.
Chen Shaoru et al. · SAGE Open Nursing · 2023
The review included 14 cross-sectional studies covering 2,848 nurses. It examined alarm fatigue and associated factors, highlighting alarm management, staffing and equipment alarm settings as areas for attention.
Boundary: equipment-alarm fatigue is not identical to interaction with an app alert. The findings motivate questions, rather than validate NurseAid’s alert strategy.
04 / What this suggests for design
Make resumption a design question.
Preserve context
NurseAid carries the selected patient and alert through review and recovery. Hypothesis: this may reduce the effort of reconstructing the task.
Make status interpretable
Patient identity, source, freshness and acknowledgment remain explicit. Hypothesis: people can distinguish current information, uncertain state and confirmed completion.
Examine the cost of another interface
A focused mobile view may help, but it could also add another place to check. Its fit with existing work remains an open question.
05 / What I would test next
Can someone return with confidence?
Proposed scenario: interrupt a participant during alert review, then ask them to resume. Observe whether they identify the patient, recover the previous context, interpret freshness and understand acknowledgment status.
Record navigation choices, comprehension, recovery difficulties and participant explanations. These would be prototype observations, not evidence of clinical effectiveness.
Open questions
Which information is essential at the moment of return?
Which interruptions support care, and which create avoidable disruption?
Does this workflow fit the devices and systems nurses already use?
From the question to prototype.
NurseAid shows how these provisional questions informed a critical-alert review and acknowledgment workflow.