Towards culture change in the operating theatre: Embedding a complex educational intervention to improve teamwork climate

Figures & data

Table

Practice points

Good teamwork reduces surgical error. Surgical culture's historical legacy of hierarchy frustrates effective teamwork. Modelling good teamwork requires a designed and sustained educational intervention. Establishing collaborative teamwork, as a culture change, requires a precondition of attitude change. Sustaining an educational intervention can result in an incremental, positive valuing of teamwork and safety by practitioners.

Figure 1. Longitudinal changes in mean teamwork climate scores across two complexes. Notes: Mean teamwork climate SAQ scores compared across two complexes (A and B) over 3+ years. Vertical axis: estimated marginal means of teamwork climate scores. Horizontal axis: batch 1 = baseline scores; batch 2 = 1 year later; batch 3 = 3 years later.

Figure 2. Mean teamwork climate scores for each location and timing of intervention.

Table 1  SAQ response rates

Table 2  Total numbers of respondents

	Total	Study total
Pre-intervention	187 (3 missing)	N = 184
Post-intervention	164 (6 missing)	N = 159

Figure 3. Comparison of standardised domain scores pre- and post-intervention (mean = 100) across the six SAQ domains (‘job satisfaction’, ‘stress recognition’, ‘perception of management’, ‘working conditions’, ‘safety climate’ and ‘teamwork climate’).