Mental Workload and Cognitive Failures Assessment of Nurses During the Period of the Covid-19 outbreak and Its Relationship with the Occurrence of Unsafe Behaviors in Public Hospitals of Guilan Province in 2019-2020

Nurses are under the influence of stressful factors and high work pressure, which increases nursing errors. One factor affecting nurses’ behavior and performance is the mental workload and cognitive failures. This research has investigated the mental workload and cognitive failures in two groups of nurses with and without unsafe behaviors during the outbreak of Covid-19.

This case-control study was conducted on 312 nurses during the severe period of the Covid-19 outbreak through the public hospitals in Guilan province. Sampling was performed by selecting 104 nurses in the case group (with unsafe behavior) and 208 nurses in the control group (with safe behavior) using the full count method. The data collection tool is a three-part questionnaire including demographic information, the mental workload (NASA-TLX) questionnaire, and the occupational cognitive failures questionnaire. The incidence of needle stick as a consequence of unsafe behavior was used as a criterion.

The results have shown that the workload in this research was 63.96±18.26, and the total score of cognitive failures was 59.1±13.9. There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups of nurses with and without unsafe behaviors (P>0.05). Still, there was a significant correlation between the total mental workload score in all areas and the total score of cognitive failures in the group of nurses with and without unsafe behaviors (p=0.001, r=0.225).

According to the results, the perceived mental workload is high for the nursing job. Despite of positive correlation between mental workload and cognitive failures, it can be mentioned that there are two-way interactions through their dimensions. Therefore, the nursing job requires adopting optimal engineering and management strategies to reduce the workload.