Understanding the perception of workload in the emergency department and its impact on medical decision making

Data collection utilized survey administration to ED residents and board-certified ED physicians within the final hour of their shift using Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) [22]. The average NASA-TLX score components of participants whose response was “no” to the question assessing certainty in MDM, showed higher mental workload (58.1 vs 50.3), lower performance (67.9 vs 75.5), greater effort (65.5 vs 61.3), greater frustration (54.3 vs 47.6) and greater total NASA-TLX scores (55.8 vs 53.4) when compared with those who stated certainty in clinical decisions (Fig. 2). Medical decision making Were you certain in all your clinical decision made during this shift? (Yes/No) Medical decision making Rate your ease of clinical decision making during this shift (Visual Analog Scale) Number of patients Can you estimate the number of patients seen during this shift?