Safety Culture and Human Factors in Foreign Object Management in Surgery

This paper examines the human and safety culture factors of the seemingly intractable problem of foreign object retention in surgery.

It reports selected findings of the FOR-RaM (Foreign Object Retention-Reduction and Mitigation) research project, which sought to discover and understand challenges to Foreign Object Management across surgical and maternity settings in Irish hospitals and to recommend changes to address these challenges.

This paper presents the findings from surgical settings in one hospital site. A qualitative action research study was conducted with a wide range of stakeholders in the study hospital; the qualitative methods included 18 Semi-structured interviews with hospital staff, structured observations in surgical settings and Action Learning Sets to validate the data collected.

The results highlight a number of safety culture and human factors considerations which may facilitate or hinder Foreign Object Management, such as (individual and team) Goals, the Processes required for successful Foreign Object Management, Culture, Teamwork, Information Management, and Training.