Critical Fatigue Factors Among Indonesian Seafarers: A Delphi Consensus Study

Seafarer fatigue is multifactorial and a leading contributor to maritime accidents, yet we identified no study establishing which fatigue factors matter most for the Indonesian fleet, and maritime prioritisation studies rarely report indices that allow their consensus to be audited. A two-round modified Delphi study was conducted with ten Indonesian maritime experts drawn from maritime safety research, maritime academia, and senior seafaring. The panel rated 14 candidate fatigue factors, derived from the authors’ systematic review of 34 articles, on a 0–10 importance scale, and separately ranked the five factors most important for governance. Consensus was assessed through agreement on relevance, dispersion, inter-rater concordance, and per-rater stability, and was reported in line with the Accurate Consensus Reporting Document (ACCORD) reporting guideline. Agreement strengthened between rounds (Kendall’s W 0.557 to 0.648; both p < 0.001), and eight of ten raters showed moderate-to-strong rank stability. Nine factors reached full content validity and were retained, dominated by sleep and operational constructs; five environmental and organisational factors were classified as contextual. The exploratory governance ranking diverged from the importance ratings. The study delivers an ordered factor set endorsed by this expert panel rather than representative of the sector, separating what instrumented monitoring should measure from what policy should act on.