The Impact of Operating Room Distractions on Stress, Workload, and Teamwork

Abstract

Although some distractions may be inevitable in the OR, they can also be detrimental to the team. A deeper understanding of the effect of distractions on teams and their outcomes can lead to targeted quality improvement.

Surgical team: improving teamwork, a review

“…However, surgeons themselves also initiated the same. It was shown that irrelevant conversations negatively impact on teamwork 18. Higher stress was associated with acoustic distractions and equipment-related distractions, all negatively impacting team working ability.…”

Evaluation of a novel tablet application for improvement in colonoscopy training and mentoring (with video)

“…9 It has been validated and successfully utilized in multiple fields including transportation, energy, construction, education, and healthcare. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] The TLX is comprised of six subscales: demand (how much mental and perceptual activity was required), physical demand (how much physical activity was required), temporal demand (how hurried or rushed was the pace of the task), performance (how successful was the subject in accomplishing what they were asked to do), effort (how hard did the subject have to work to accomplish the level of performance), and frustration level (how insecure, discouraged, irritated, stressed, and annoyed was the subject). 8 All subscales range from 0 (very low) to 100 (very high), with the exception of Performance, where 0 is perfect and 100 is failure.…”

Effectiveness of a comprehensive mental skills curriculum in enhancing surgical performance: Results of a randomized controlled trial

“…[1][2][3] It has been postulated that there is a dynamic, cascading relationship between adverse factors that contribute to surgeons' stress levels. 4 That is, increased intraoperative workload can contribute to heightened cognitive demand, which can eventually surpass the surgeon or team's stress-coping ability, ultimately leading to excessive stress. In a recent survey of surgeons' experience managing intraoperative stressors, we found that 40% of responding surgeons had witnessed a technical complication resulting from the primary surgeon experiencing heightened stress.…”