Production pressures among anaesthesiologists in Singapore

Production pressure is the pressure on personnel to prioritise production ahead of safety. We assessed the prevalence of production pressures among anaesthesiologists in Singapore.

A random online survey was conducted among local anaesthesiologists. Questions were asked about attitudes to production pressures in the work environment, occurrence of situations involving unsafe actions, and rating of the intensity of external and internal sources of pressure.

Demographically, our respondents were largely similar to all anaesthesiologists in Singapore and were fairly distributed across various tertiary hospitals. Nearly half (44.5%) had witnessed production pressures, with a colleague pressured to conduct anaesthesia in an unsafe manner. Such events included pressure from surgeons to proceed for elective surgery in patients without adequate optimisation, pressure to employ anaesthetic techniques that surgeons wanted, having to source for operating rooms to finish the surgeon's list, and being misled regarding surgical time. Over half (52.3%) made errors in clinical judgement due to excess workload. A heavy elective list workload was significantly associated with proceeding with patients despite lack of appropriate support, making changes to practices to avoid delaying the start of surgery and sourcing for operating rooms to finish the surgeon's list (p < 0.05), and being pressured to proceed with patients that the anaesthesiologist would otherwise have cancelled (p < 0.01). The need to avoid delaying the start of surgery and reduce turnover time between patients were the top-ranked internal and external pressures, respectively.

Production pressure is prevalent among anaesthesiologists in Singapore and is correlated with a heavy workload.