Working long hours and being sleep deprived is common for doctors and nurses. A multitude of medical studies describe the consequences of fatigue, which include slower reaction times, decreased performance, and impaired judgment. A new report published in the journal Cortex describes yet another impairment caused by fatigue: transient amnesia.

The article can be purchased here:

[Fatigue amnesia](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945216300284)

It includes reports of medical professionals who had to attend to attention-demanding episodes of care, who had their decisions recorded in writing, and completely forgot what they did hours later.

The amnesic episodes were isolated and did not recur in any of the doctors. However, the researchers concluded:

While the resulting memory gaps can reasonably be described as resulting from a ‘transient amnesic state’, the evidence from the medical notes suggest that this phenomenon reflects a novel form of accelerated long-term forgetting (Elliott, Isaac, & Muhlert, 2014), whereby a memory for events is acquired normally but then decays more rapidly than usual.

This research has obvious implications for healthcare professionals and their patients. A medical professional suffering from temporary amnesia is a possible danger to their patients. Imagine a nurse who forgets that he/she administered a medication to a patient, and as a result double dose the patient. Such a medication error could have deadly results.

Considering the obvious danger that fatigued medical professionals present, healthcare facilities should enact safeguards to protect patients from fatigued doctors and nurses.