Cross-sectional study reveals increased medication administration failure in sleepy nursing students, suggesting clinical readiness is vulnerable to sleep debt.
Background: Sleep deprivation is common among undergraduate nursing students and may affect cognitive processing and clinical decision-making. While clinician fatigue is well studied, less is known about how student sleepiness relates to foundational skills performance. Purpose: This study examined associations between self-reported sleepiness and clinical readiness during standardized skills checkoffs. Methods: In a cross-sectional sample of 83 students, participants completed the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and 6 faculty-graded skills evaluations. Mann–Whitney U tests and logistic regression assessed relationships between sleep variables and pass/fail outcomes. Results: Higher Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index scores corresponded with higher KSS values, and some skills showed more failures at higher sleepiness levels. Only medication administration differed significantly by KSS group ( U = 338, P = .016). Other skills and the logistic model were nonsignificant. Conclusion: Descriptive trends suggested possible links between sleepiness and performance, but inferential results were inconsistent.
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Winegar et al. (2026) studied this question.
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