Operating Room Black Box Supported Debriefings and Their Effect on Healthcare Professionals Effectiveness and Psychological Safety.

Plain-language summary

This study is enrolled in the European KEEPCARING Project. KEEPCARING aims to (re-)build wellbeing and resilience of healthcare workforce in EU hospitals by co-creating a multi-faceted non-digital, digital, and AI-supported solution package to prevent burnout among (aspirant) healthcare professionals on the individual, team, and organizational level. This study specifically investigate the operating room staff wellbeing and resilience. The healthcare system is currently struggling to retain and attract operating room personnel. A factor of importance to consider here is occupational stress. If not recognized or mitigated well, occupational stress and personal efficacy can eventually evolve into a syndrome labelled as 'burnout'. In addition, communication and resilience patterns between operating room staff members are of influence, poor and/or inadequate communication among staff may be a factor of stress, compromising their work and wellbeing. In contrast, communication patterns that have a high standard and clarity may support resilience. The ability to speak up and being able to advocate concerns of all team members is of the highest importance here. Indeed, psychological safety and effective teamwork patterns are key for the working environment, performance, patient safety, and job satisfaction. To prevent mistakes during surgery, a safe space where team members can freely speak up is vital. To improve psychological safety, and teamwork among OR staff, team debriefing after surgery is known to be effective. What is not known; is whether team debriefing with the additional support derived from audio- and video recordings of the surgery is equally effective as debriefing without. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of structured postoperative debriefings with and without procedural, structured audio- and video recordings, on team performance, psychological safety, and non-technical skills in the operating room. Specifically, this study aims to compare augmented debriefings with non-augmented debriefings, to assess differences in perceived usefulness, psychological safety, and observed improvements in teams' non-technical skills. This is an international quasi-experimental comparative study. The intervention consists of postoperative team debriefing using audio and video recordings ('augmented debriefing') from Operating Room Black Box system provided by Surgical Safety Technologies. The control group will have a postoperative team debriefing that is not augmented with Operating Room Black Box derived data. An identical debriefing template will be designed for both groups.

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