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Article Info Background: Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) are among the most common occupational problems facing surgical technologists in the operating room, which could be associated with high costs and a reduction in the healthcare quality. The operating room could be the source of various types of surgical errors caused by numerous invasive procedures. This study aimed to investigate the correlation between musculoskeletal disorders and medical errors in surgical technologists. Materials and Methods: This descriptive study was carried out on 201 operating room surgical technologists working at Sari City hospitals. The samples were selected by convenience sampling. Data collection instruments included the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire and the operating room-related medical errors questionnaire. Data were analyzed by SPSS software and the Pearson's correlation model. Results: The results showed that disorders in the lumbar and back regions were the most common disorders among surgical technologists with the prevalence of 51.2%. In addition, there was a significant correlation between medical errors and WMSDs in the wrist and knee regions (P <0.05). There was also a significant relationship between gender, BMI, marital status, regular exercise, and weekly working hours with WMSDs, as well as between medical errors and gender (P <0.05). Conclusion: The prevalence of WMSDs and medical errors was high among surgical technologists; therefore, given the high-risk environment of the operating room, proper measures must be adopted to reduce WMSDs and medical errors.

Objective Handover without a structured format is prone to the omission of information and could be a potential risk to patient safety. We sought to determine the effect of a structured checklist on the quality of intraoperative change of shift handover between scrubs and circulars. Methods We conducted a control intervention study on operating room wards of two teaching hospitals from 20 Feb to 21 Nov 2020. This research was conducted in three stages as follows: assessing the current situation (as a group before the intervention), performing the intervention and evaluating the effect of using a checklist on handover quality after the intervention in two groups: with and without checklist. We examined the quality of handover between scrub and circular personnel in terms of handover duration and quality, omission of information and improvement in OR staff satisfaction. Results A total of 120 handovers were observed and evaluated. After intervention in the group using the checklist, the percentage of information omission in surgical report was decreased from 19.5 to 12.1% between scrubs (P < 0.00) and from 16.8 to 14.1% between circulars (P < 0.03). Also, in the role of scrub, the mean overall score of handover process quality was significantly higher after the intervention (x̄ = 7 ± 1.5) than before it (x̄ = 6.5 ± 0.9) (p < 0.02). In the role of circulating, despite the positive effect of overall score checklist, no significant difference was observed (p < 0.08). The use of checklist significantly increased the handover duration between scrubs (p < 0.03) and circulars (p < 0.00). The overall mean percentage of handover satisfaction increased from 67.5% before the intervention to 85.5% after the intervention (p < 0.00). Conclusion The implementation of a new structured handover checklist had a positive impact on improving the quality of communication between the surgical team, reducing the information omission rate and increasing the satisfaction.