Introduction to Cognitive Ergonomics and the OR Black Box with Dr. Patricia Trbovich

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Q-optics. You can learn about them, the special rates they are offering for podcast listerners and schedule a demo via : https://q-optics.com/pages/surgicalergonomics-drlalDisclosure: Q-optics is a paid sponsor and the affiliate link above supports the podcast at no cost to you. It also provides you with a discount and a giveaway to listeners of the podcast, so we hope that it is a win-win!Episode details:Dr. Patricia Trbovich is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and cross appointed at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. She holds the Badeau Family Research Chair in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement at North York General Hospital. She is the Research and Scholarship lead, Centre for Quality Improvement & Patient Safety (C-QuIPS). Patricia leads HumanEra, a team dedicated to enhancing healthcare safety and performance through human factors research. With over 15 years of experience, she's implemented health technologies and trained professionals worldwide. Now, she’s focused on advancing surgical safety through innovative tools such as the OR Black Box to identify safety threats to provider and patient safety, apply human factors principles to operationalize resilience, and prototype and test human factors informed interventions.  In this episode Dr. Trbovich:- Shares her training background and how she arrived at her current role- Defines cognitive ergonomics as a branch of Human Factors that focuses on how we design systems to support the way people think, the way they make decisions and how they manage information, especially under pressure- Describes the consequences of not paying attention to workers' cognitive ergonomics in the OR, such as, creating conditions where they are overloaded and forced into task-switching (often mistaken for multi-tasking) which then increases the risk of errors- Discusses her work where her team have identified the most interrupted time for anesthesiologists (i.e. emergence) and nurses (i.e. closing counts)- Elaborates on the OR black box and other tools (surveys such as the NASA-Task Load Index, observations, objective measures of physiologic responses and behavior markers) that are used to study interruptions and understand work as it is done, and not as it is imagined- Shares Black box data is useful to look at not only safety threats but also resilience supports and psychological safety.....- Discusses strategies for preserving cognitive bandwidth of various team members in the OR e.g. calling out increasing cognitive load prior to it reaching a critical point, using checklists and other visual indicators and looking at how often staff are task-switching You can learn more about the work references in this episode in these articles:1) https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/15/10/e104713.long2)https://journals.lww.com/annalsofsurgery/fulltext/2024/07000/using_the_operating_room_black_box_to_assess.13.aspxYou can reach Dr. Trbovich on Linked InFollow Surgical Ergonomics on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube please reach out to us if you have any suggestions regarding episode ideas and guests or if you'd like to be a guest on the podcastIf you found this episode valuable, please share it with a colleague or your perioperative team to help bring greater awareness to the role of ergonomics in career longevity. If you're enjoying the podcast, I'd be grateful if you left a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your reviews help others discover the show and support our mission of improving the health and longevity of surgeons and proceduralists worldwide.