Fatigue: For safe patients we need safe nurses.

In an era where the importance of staff wellbeing has become the focus of many organizational activities and self-help interventions, and the topic of numerous research studies (Almeida et al., 2024), the impact of staff fatigue in healthcare still seems overlooked. In this commentary we highlight the importance of staff fatigue and its detrimental impact on nurses and patient safety. We argue that staff wellbeing should not focus only on mental health and team support, but that more attention is needed on issues of tiredness, exhaustion or fatigue. Tiredness is heaviness or weakness after physical work, which is relieved by rest. Exhaustion is an inability to respond to emotional or physical stressors and is part of a triad of features alongside depersonalisation and lack of job satisfaction known as burnout (Scholliers et al., 2023). Fatigue is a state of reduced physiological and cognitive performance impacting the ability to do ones job.