With directed study before a 4-day operating room management course, trust in the content did not change...

A 4-day course in operating room (OR) management is sufficient to provide anesthesiologists with the knowledge and problem solving skills needed to participate in projects of the systems-based-practice competency. Anesthesiologists may need to learn fewer topics when the objective is, instead, limited to comprehension of decision-making on the day of surgery, We tested the hypothesis that trust in course content would not increase further after completion of topics related to OR decision-making on the day of surgery.

Panel survey.

A 4-day 35hour course in OR management. Mandatory assignments before classes were: 1) review of statistics at a level slightly less than required of anesthesiology residents by the American Board of Anesthesiology; and 2) reading of peer-reviewed published articles while learning the scientific vocabulary.

N=31 course participants who each attended 1 of 4 identical courses.

At the end of each of the 4days, course participants completed a 9-item scale assessing trust in the course content, namely, its quality, usefulness, and reliability.

Cronbach alpha for the 1 to 7 trust scale was 0.94. The means±SD of scores were 5.86±0.80 after day #1, 5.81±0.76 after day #2, 5.80±0.77 after day #3, and 5.97±0.76 after day #4. Multiple methods of statistical analysis all found that there was no significant effect of the number of days of the course on trust in the content (all P≥0.30).

Trust in the course content did not increase after the end of the 1st day. Therefore, statistics review, reading, and the 1st day of the course appear sufficient when the objective of teaching OR management is not that participants will learn how to make the decisions, but will comprehend them and trust in the information underlying knowledgeable decision-making.