[Participation--oriented analysis of the anesthesia workplace. A work system for anesthesia in a multidisciplinary operating room]

Refocusing on work-based hazards for the anaesthesiologist in a post-pandemic era

The coronavirus pandemic has raised public awareness of one of the many hazards that healthcare workers face daily: exposure to harmful pathogens. The anaesthesia workplace encompasses the operating room, interventional radiology suite, and other sites that contain many other potential occupational and environmental hazards. This review article highlights the work-based hazards that anaesthesiologists and other clinicians may encounter in the anaesthesia workplace: ergonomic design, physical, chemical, fire, biological, or psychological hazards. As the anaesthesia work environment enters a post-COVID-19 pandemic phase, anaesthesiologists will do well to review and consider these hazards. The current review includes proposed solutions to some hazards and identifies opportunities for future research.

Ergonomics in the operating room – from the anesthesiologist's point of view

Over the past years, progress in medicine and the development of a multitude of new devices have made the tasks to be performed in operating rooms increasingly complex; at the same time, more and more equipment is necessary to perform these tasks and make surgery as safe as possible for the patients. These developments are also relevant for the field of anesthetic care; when planning new operating rooms or restructuring existing ones, attention should be paid to provide the anesthesia team with an adequate work environment so that all anesthetic procedures can be carried out safely and efficiently and an optimal workflow can be established in the OR environment. The present paper illuminates this topic from various angles, discussing questions of space requirements, monitoring, alarm systems, equipment design, documentation and human factors. All these individual considerations should ultimately be integrated into a coherent approach which could serve as guidance in the planning of effective and ergonomic anesthesia workplaces for the future.

A PDA-based system for online recording and analysis of concurrent events in complex behavioral processes

This article outlines how a Palm- or Newton-based PDA (personal digital assistant) system for online event recording was used to record and analyze concurrent events. We describe the features of this PDA-based system, called the FIT-System (flexible interface technique), and its application to the analysis of concurrent events in complex behavioral processes--in this case, anesthesia work processes. The patented FIT-System has a unique user interface design allowing the user to design an interface template with a pencil and paper or using a transparency film. The template usually consists of a drawing or sketch that includes icons or symbols that depict the observer's representation of the situation to be observed. In this study, the FIT-System allowed us to create a design for fast, intuitive online recording of concurrent events using a set of 41 observation codes. An analysis of concurrent events leads to a description of action density, and our results revealed a characteristic distribution of action density during the administration of anesthesia in the operating room. This distribution indicated the central role of the overlapping operations in the action sequences of medical professionals as they deal with the varying requirements of this complex task. We believe that the FIT-System for online recording of concurrent events in complex behavioral processes has the potential to be useful across a broad spectrum of research areas.