Operating Room Teams Display Acceptable Levels of Patient Safety Behaviors During Surgical Cases.

INTRODUCTION: Cornerstones of patient safety include reliable safety behaviors proposed by Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) practices. A better quantification of these behaviors is needed to establish a baseline for future improvement efforts. METHODS: At one large academic medical center, OR Teams were prospectively assigned to be observed during surgical cases, and patient safety behaviors were quantified using the Teamwork Evaluation of Non-Technical Skills (TENTS) instrument. Mean scores of each TENTS behavior were calculated with 95% confidence intervals and compared using a paired t-test with a false discovery rate (FDR) control. Using the TENTS instrument, one hundred one surgical cases were observed by purposefully trained medical student volunteers. The average with 95% confidence interval (CI) of observed safety behaviors quantified using the TENTS instrument (including 20 types of safety behaviors scored 0 = expected but not observed, 1 = observed but poorly performed or counterproductive, 2 = observed and acceptable, and 3 = observed and excellent). RESULTS: All safety behaviors averaged slightly above 2, and the lower bound of 95% CI was above 2 for all behaviors except one. Statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) were detected between a few safety behaviors, with the lowest-rated safety behavior being "employs conflict resolution" (2.07, 95% CI: 1.96-2.18) and the highest-rated behavior being "willingness to support others across roles" (2.36, 95% CI: 2.27-2.45). There were no significant differences (p > 0.05) based on the number of persons present during the case, case duration, or by surgical department. CONCLUSIONS: Given the persistent patient safety incidents in ORs nationwide, it might be necessary to advance these behaviors from acceptable to exceptional to advance patient safety.

Analysis of patient safety event report categories at one large academic hospital.

Given the persistent safety incidents in operating rooms (ORs) nationwide (approx. 4,000 preventable harmful surgical errors per year), there is a need to better analyze and understand reported patient safety events. This study describes the results of applying the Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) supported by the Teamwork Evaluation of Non-Technical Skills (TENTS) instrument to analyze patient safety event reports at one large academic medical center. Results suggest that suboptimal behaviors stemming from poor communication, lack of situation monitoring, and inappropriate task prioritization and execution were implicated in most reported events. Our proposed methodology offers an effective way of programmatically sorting and prioritizing patient safety improvement efforts.