PaperBridging the communication gap in the operating room with medical team training
Section snippets
Methods
To determine the baseline communication among nurses, surgeons, and anesthesiologists, a validated Likert scale survey with questions aimed at communication in the OR was administered. This was followed by a dedicated training session that was offered to the entire surgical service by the Veteran’s Affairs (VA) National Center for Patient Safety using crew resource management principles. This course consisted of didactic instruction, interactive participation, role-play, training films, and
Results
After the implementation of team training, the number of briefings performed was reviewed during 3 separate time periods. Fig. 1 shows an increase in the number of preoperative briefings from 64% at 1 month after implementation increasing to 100% by 4 months after implementation. To determine the impact of briefings on perceived communication among surgeons, anesthesiologists, and OR nurses, the results of the communication survey were examined at baseline and at 4 months after implementation
Comments
Poor communication among health care providers can result in potentially avoidable catastrophic medical errors. An increase in the publication of both retrospective and prospective studies has helped to shed more light on the challenging problem of medical errors. Data from the root-cause analysis database from the VA National Center for Patient Safety identified that 82% of root-cause analyses cited communication failure as at least one of the contributing/causal factors in an adverse event or
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