Unsettled Teamwork: Communication and Learning in the Operating Theatres of an Urban Hospital

Aim: To explore the unsettling effects of increased mobility of nurses, surgeons and other healthcare professionals on communication and learning in the operating theatre.

Background: Increasingly, healthcare professionals step in and out of newly formed transient teams and work with colleagues they have not met before, unsettling previously relatively stable team work based on shared, local knowledge accumulated over significant periods of close collaboration.

Design: An ethnographic case study was conducted of the operating theatre department of a major teaching hospital in London.

Method: Video recordings were made of 20 operations, involving different teams. The recordings were systematically reviewed and coded. Instances where difficulties arose in the communication between scrub nurse and surgeons were identified and subjected to detailed, interactional analysis.

Findings: Instrument requests frequently prompted clarification from the scrub nurse (e.g. 'Sorry, what did you want?'). Such requests were either followed by a relatively elaborate clarification, designed to maximize learning opportunities, or a by a relatively minimal clarification, designed to achieve the immediate task at hand.

Conclusions: Significant variation exists in the degree of support given to scrub nurses requesting clarification. Some surgeons experience such requests as disruptions, while others treat them as opportunities to build shared knowledge.