Enhancing Surgical Team Efficiency with Preoperative Huddles

As a medical statistician, I am privileged to contribute to projects that directly impact patient safety and healthcare efficiency. One such project, titled "The Implementation of a Daily Preoperative Team Huddle to Improve Patient Safety and Efficiency in Operating Theatres: A Prospective Study," involved collaboration with Dr. Rachel RP Lee and her team at the Prince of Wales Hospital and Sydney Children's Hospital, Randwick.

Introduction

Effective teamwork, communication, and planning are essential for patient safety in surgical environments. Preoperative team huddles, or briefings, play a crucial role in fostering these elements by encouraging non-technical skills (NTS) such as communication, teamwork, and information sharing. This study aimed to measure the compliance and impact of daily preoperative team huddles on safety, efficiency, and teamwork in operating theatres.

Key Findings

The preoperative team huddles were implemented in October 2023 across operating theatres at the Prince of Wales Hospital and Sydney Children's Hospital. The study aimed to achieve at least 80% compliance with multidisciplinary attendance at these huddles.

Main Results:

Compliance: Post-intervention data showed a significant increase in full multidisciplinary huddle compliance from 0% to 80.6% (P < 2.2e-16), with 97% of huddles having at least one doctor present.
Safety and Efficiency: Despite the improvement in compliance, the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) scores showed a small but statistically significant decrease (76.6% vs. 72.2%; P = 0.03477). However, 84% of staff agreed that the huddles improved communication, and 85% agreed they improved team members' awareness.

Implications

The results indicate that while the introduction of team huddles significantly improved multidisciplinary attendance and was positively received by staff in terms of communication and planning, it also highlighted areas for further improvement, such as addressing barriers to full team participation and ensuring punctuality.

My Role

In this project, my role was pivotal in understanding the dataset, building explanatory notebooks, and creating visualisations highlighting key findings and trends. Here’s how I contributed:

Data Analysis: Collaborated on analysing pre- and post-intervention data to assess the impact of team huddles.
Explanatory Notebooks: Developed detailed notebooks explaining the statistical methods used, ensuring transparency and accessibility of the findings.
Visualisations: Created visual aids to present the study’s results clearly, facilitating better understanding and communication of the data.

Conclusion

This project successfully demonstrated that implementing daily preoperative team huddles can enhance multidisciplinary collaboration and improve communication in operating theatres. While some challenges remain, the positive feedback from staff underscores the potential of team huddles to enhance patient safety and operational efficiency significantly.