Human Factors: Do They Impact Surgical Performance?

Area of Science:

• Surgical Performance
• Human Factors in Medicine
• Cognitive Load in Surgery

Background:

• Human factors encompass environmental, organizational, and individual elements influencing operating theatre performance.
• Understanding these factors is crucial for optimizing surgical outcomes and patient safety.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of specific human factors on surgical performance metrics.
• To assess how auditory stimuli (music) and cognitive tasks (counting backwards, task-switching) affect surgical efficiency and accuracy.

Main Methods:

• Ten orthopaedic surgical staff participated in a 'don't buzz the wire' maze task.
• Performance was measured by course completion time and number of wire touches under four conditions: control, music, counting backwards, and verbalizing dynamic hip screw (DHS) fixation steps.

Main Results:

• Verbalizing DHS fixation steps significantly increased completion time (69.8s vs 33.8s control, p=0.0039) and wire touches (10.6 vs 4.3 control, p=0.0078).
• Counting backwards moderately increased completion time (38.7s) but not wire touches (4).
• Music had no significant effect on completion time (33.4s) and reduced wire touches (2.2).

Conclusions:

• Cognitive load, particularly from simultaneous task execution like verbalizing surgical procedures, detrimentally impacts surgical performance.
• Awareness of these human factors is essential for developing strategies to mitigate negative effects in the operating theatre.