Abstract / Summary
Abstract Emergency physicians (EPs) continuously staff emergency departments, where rotating schedules, extended shifts, and night work may limit sleep opportunities and hinder recovery. This 4-week repeated-measures field study examined associations among daily sleep duration, shift characteristics, and next-day self-reported recovery across 447 working-day observations from 44 EPs. Recovery was higher on days when physicians slept longer than their average sleep duration, whereas neither shift duration relative to physician’s average nor the sleep-by-shift-duration interaction was significantly associated with recovery. With respect to shift type, night shifts were associated with lower sleep duration and lower recovery than afternoon and morning shifts. Physician-level bootstrap mediation analyses indicated that sleep duration accounted for part of the association between shift type and recovery, while significant direct associations remained for morning and afternoon shifts relative to night shifts. These findings identify protected sleep opportunity and circadian-informed scheduling as potentially modifiable targets for supporting EP recovery and well-being.