Importance of Communication in the Operations Room

Communications in the Operations RoomYour NameCourseDate
Importance of Communication in the Operations Room
Communication plays an important role in different aspects of life and failure to have appropriate communication often leads to negative outcomes. There are some environments such as the cardiac surgery operations room (OR) where ineffective communication can lead to poor surgical outcomes. As Wadhera et al (2010) notes, 31% of all the communication issues within the OR department were characterized by poor timing of communication, provision of inaccurate of inaccurate or incomplete information and the failure to resolve issues during a surgery CITATION Wad10 \l 1033 (Wadhera, et al., 2010). There are also different channels of communication and some of them are carried out in a protocol manner or what has been defined as the ‘cockpit’ communication after Korean Air. This is where one has to follow a certain hierarchy before delivering communication. Even though hierarchical communication is good, in the OR, hierarchical communication can sometime hinder delivery of information in different ways.
Developing a culture of safety is important during surgery. In the cardiothoracic industry, the surgeons are always informed to have open communication with the team members and avoid errors completely. It creates a culture of ‘zero’ errors when the surgeon is carrying out the surgery. Since the communication model is hierarchical, communication about patient safety is only carried out by the senior surgeon and no one else should carry it out. However, even though the surgery environment requires that the surgeon should not make any errors, this in my view can create an environment where the surgeons are carrying out their duties in a way that they want to avoid error without even inquiring from the patient about their safety. As Wilson et al (2017) notes, errors during the surgical procedures are not entirely preventable. We need to understand that potential errors can take place during the surgery CITATION Wil171 \l 1033 (Wilson, Whyte, Gangadharan, & Kent, 2017). Some surgeons can also ignore communication from the team members since they are striving to be perfect. This can indeed worsen the situation instead of improving it. Therefore, the best way on ensuring that there is patient safety in the OR room is focusing on reduction of errors and in an error occurs, there should be communication so that it can be resolved. Failure to communicate when an error happens is due to the fear of the mistake. Some of the team members can fail to acknowledge a mistake since they think that they will be reprimanded if they talk about the mistake.
An alternative way of improving communication within OR is identifying the critical events. Critical events during a surgery include incision, intubation, surgical pause and the sponge and the instrument cuts. Before the beginning o...