Title: Surgical disruption: information quality perspective

Authors: Latif Al-Hakim

Addresses: Faculty of Business, University of Southern Queensland, Queensland 4350, Australia

Abstract: Common surgical errors can be prevented or intercepted by avoiding disruptions inside the operating rooms. This paper uses Information Quality (IQ) concepts and identifies information elements that cause disruptions. It reports preliminary results from 27 observed surgeries conducted in two Australian hospitals. The methodology used employs an |object-centred| strategy in which the object is the surgeon and records the time during which the surgeon has to wait unnecessarily. Results indicated that disruptions prolonged surgical time and forces surgeons to unnecessary wait for more than 19% of the normal surgical time. However, due to the small number of observations more work is required to provide a better coverage to the vast causes of disruptions unaccounted for in this study.

Keywords: surgical disruptions; information quality; governance information; surgery; surgical operations; Australia; surgical time; healthcare.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIQ.2008.022963

International Journal of Information Quality, 2008 Vol.2 No.2, pp.192 - 204

Published online: 05 Feb 2009 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article