Reply to Patterson et al. Commentary: Fatigue risk management in emergency services personnel

We would like to thank our colleagues for pointing out their previously published work. We agree that their paper is an excellent ‘companion piece’ to our paper. Indeed, there is significant complementarity in the scope of the respective papers. Our paper addresses issues for emergency services personnel. In Australia this is primarily paid and volunteer fire, ambulance emergency services along with other first responder groups that typically ‘travel to’ an emergency. In the Australian context this explicitly excludes hospital-based health care professionals who receive injured individuals from emergency services. It would appear that this distinction may not be the same in the United States where emergency services perhaps includes hospital-based health care professionals.