Nancy Redfern

Nancy Redfern is a consultant anaesthetist in Newcastle upon Tyne, with interests in obstetric and neuroanaesthesia. Her long-term non-clinical interests include staff wellbeing, fatigue, mentorship, education, and workforce.

As Honorary Membership Secretary and Vice President of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland, she established mentoring at the Association and started their work on fatigue. She co-chaired the national Joint Fatigue Working Group from 2018 to 2024, which worked to improve understanding and management of work-related fatigue, and she is one of the directors of The Fatigue Group Community Interest Company.

Newcastle upon Tyne hospitals are the first in the UK to put fatigue on the risk register, and Nancy works with the fatigue team to provide staff education and to support teams in developing their approach to fatigue. She is involved in research on the implementation of safe fatigue risk management in acute hospital settings, and speaks widely on wellbeing issues.

She is also co-chair of the Workforce, Working Conditions and Welfare group of the European Board, where she led the surveys on the impacts of fatigue on trainee and consultant anaesthetists throughout Europe. Because of this work, she also advises the European Patient Safety Foundation, who have a major European project on fatigue risk management in healthcare.