What Are the Principles That Guide Behaviors in the Operating Room?

Abstract

This study provides a comprehensive definition of intraoperative expertise, with greater insight into the complex cognitive processes that seem to underlie optimal performance. This framework provides trainees and other nonexperts with the necessary information to use in deliberate practice and the creation of effective thought habits that characterize expert performance. It may help to identify gaps in performance, and to isolate root causes of surgical errors with the ultimate goal of improving patient safety.

Systematic review of measurement tools to assess surgeons' intraoperative cognitive workload

“…In the past two decades, great effort has been devoted to assess surgeons' intraoperative performance and pinpoint the many factors that may either improve, or impair surgical care. In certain situations, high demands imposed by surgical tasks and other factors, such as teaching and flow disruption, may exceed surgeons' cognitive capacity, leading to a potentially risky cognitive overload.…”

Learning theories and principles in surgical education and technical learning

“…Cognitive task analysis can illuminate key decision‐making steps of operations 15 . Surgical outcomes are now being increasingly acknowledged as related to the cognitive strengths of the surgeon as well as technical ability 16 . Thereafter, Hamdorf and Hall indicate integration occurs.…”

“…Related to thinking about how nontechnical and cognitive skills relate to the adoption of technical skills, Madani et al 16 emphasized the key principles that guide operating room behavior, adding to the notion that manual dexterity is not sufficient to make a good surgeon (Figure 3). The surgical learner must adapt and synthesize five domains.…”

Understanding when students are active‐in‐thinking through modeling‐in‐context

“…There is a considerable body of research that construes active thinking not as the mere possession of particular bits of knowledge or the demonstration of skills in isolation, but as a process of integrating them to frame, investigate, and solve complex problems (see, e.g., DiSessa, 1988;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Madani et al, 2017;Shaffer, 2012). The theory of epistemic frames (Shaffer, 2012), for example, suggests that active thinking consists of the cognitive connections that people make among the knowledge, skills, values, and ways of making decisions characteristic of some domain.…”