Common surgical errors can be prevented or intercepted by avoiding disruptions inside the operating rooms. This paper uses Information Quality (IQ) concepts and identifies information elements that cause disruptions. It reports preliminary results from 27 observed surgeries conducted in two Australian hospitals. The methodology used employs an 'object-centred' strategy in which the object is the surgeon and records the time during which the surgeon has to wait unnecessarily. Results indicated that disruptions prolonged surgical time and forces surgeons to unnecessary wait for more than 19% of the normal surgical time. However, due to the small number of observations more work is required to provide a better coverage to the vast causes of disruptions unaccounted for in this study.
['Latif Al-Hakim']
Surgical disruption: information quality perspective