Clinician Cognitive Overload and Its Implications for Nurse Leaders

Nurse leaders have a responsibility to recognize signs of cognitive overload among nurses and take active measures to reduce cognitive burden and its consequences. Every day, nurses make mistakes because they are overwhelmed with high volumes of complex information received during a single shift by multiple people, devices, and clinical systems. Reducing cognitive load will help create a more satisfying work environment for care teams and foster well-being and retention. Heath care leaders need to offload nurses' need to retrieve, retain, and record information, and make it easier to do their job more efficiently and effectively. Standardizing communication on a single platform and simplifying clinical workflows will go a long way to mitigating interruptions, reducing cognitive load, and improving quality of care and patient safety.