Citation

Høyland S, Haugen AS, Thomassen. Safety Sci. 2014; 70: 70-79.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2014.05.009

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The drive for effectiveness and productivity in health care combined with a high percentage of adverse events in hospitals occurring in the operating room, suggest that more knowledge about safety in surgery is warranted. As a step in this direction, explorations of safety in surgical operations should account for the unique operational perspective of health care providers. In this article, we explore one particular safety aspect of surgical operations: frontline personnel's perceptions of operating room time, both in itself and in relation to the WHO's Surgical Safety Checklist. Specifically, we provide results from a focus group study undertaken in a surgical section of a Norwegian university hospital. The study included a total of 14 participants from the professions that typically comprise an operating team; surgeons, nurses, and anesthetists. Based on a content analysis of the collected material, we believe that strengthening both the structural conditions surrounding surgery and the safety mentality of managers and operating personnel can prevent compromises in safety tasks and instead allow priority to planning, diagnosis and checklists, with associated potential for improvement in awareness, preparedness, and systemizing as well as reduction in total operating room time. This might represent a key factor in improving patient safety in surgical operations. We also identify a need for deeper explorations that shed further light on the complexity of the operating room time phenomenon.