Healthcare providers' perceptions of a situational awareness display for emergency department resuscitation: a simulation qualitative study.

Importance: Emergency resuscitation of critically ill patients can challenge team communication and situational awareness. Tools facilitating team performance may enhance patient safety.

Objectives: To determine resuscitation team members' perceptions of the Situational Awareness Display's utility.

Can teamwork and situational awareness (SA) in ED resuscitations be improved with a technological cognitive aid? Design and a pilot study of a team situation display.

Unlabelled: Effective teamwork in ED resuscitations, including information sharing and situational awareness, could be degraded. Technological cognitive aids can facilitate effective teamwork.

Objective: This study focused on the design of an ED situation display and pilot test its influence on teamwork and situational awareness during simulated resuscitation scenarios.

Getting a Picture.

Unlabelled: Delivery of care by nurses in virtual environments is rapidly increasing with uptake of digitally mediated technologies, such as remote patient monitoring (RPM). Knowing the person is a phenomenon in nursing practice deemed requisite to building relationships and informing clinical decisions, but it has not been studied in virtual environments.

Purpose Of Study: The intent of this study was to explicate the processes of how nurses come to know the person using RPM, one form of telehealth technology used in a virtual environment.

Implementation of an Electronic Data Collection Tool to Monitor Nursing-Sensitive Indicators in a Large Academic Health Sciences Centre.

Background: Monitoring the quality of nursing care is essential to identify patients at risk, measure adherence to hospital policies and evaluate the effectiveness of best practice interventions. However, monitoring nursing-sensitive indicators (NSI) is a challenge. Prevalence surveys are one method used by some organizations to monitor NSI, which are patient outcomes that are directly affected by the quantity or quality of nursing care that the patient receives.

Transferring patient care: patterns of synchronous bidisciplinary communication between physicians and nurses during handoffs in a critical care unit.

Purpose: The transfer of patient care from one health care worker to another involves communication in high-pressure contexts that are often vulnerable to error. This research project captured current practices for handoffs during the critical care stage of surgical recovery in a hospital setting. The objective was to characterize information flow during transfer and identify patterns of communication between nurses and physicians.

Building an Electronic Handover Tool for Physicians Using a Collaborative Approach between Clinicians and the Development Team.

In an effort by The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) to become one of the top 10% performers in patient safety and quality of care, the hospital embarked on improving the communication process during handover between physicians by building an electronic handover tool. It is expected that this tool will decrease information loss during handover. The Information Systems (IS) department engaged a workgroup of physicians to become involved in defining requirements to build an electronic handover tool that suited their clinical handover needs.

Using team cognitive work analysis to reveal healthcare team interactions in a birthing unit.

Unlabelled: Cognitive work analysis (CWA) as an analytical approach for examining complex sociotechnical systems has shown success in modelling the work of single operators. The CWA approach incorporates social and team interactions, but a more explicit analysis of team aspects can reveal more information for systems design. In this paper, Team CWA is explored to understand teamwork within a birthing unit at a hospital.

Communication and team situation awareness in the OR: Implications for augmentative information display.

Team Situation Awareness (TSA) is one of the critical factors in effective Operating Room (OR) teamwork and can impact patient safety and quality of care. While previous research showed a relationship between situation awareness, as measured by communication events, and team performance, the implications for developing technology to augment and facilitate TSA were not examined. This research aims to further study situation-related communications in the cardiac OR in order to uncover potential degradation in TSA which may lead to adverse events.

Using human factors methods to evaluate the labelling of injectable drugs.

Adverse drug events, including in-hospital medication errors, are a well-documented world-wide problem. This interdisciplinary team set out to examine the issues related to the labelling of injectable drugs. We sought answers to the following two questions: (1) To what extent do injectable drug labels adhere to existing Canadian design practice recommendations and regulations for labelling and (2) is there a need to make changes to the recommendations or regulations for labelling of injectable drugs in Canada? The project contained three phases.

Using personal digital assistants and patient care algorithms to improve access to cardiac care best practices.

In order to facilitate knowledge transfer between specialists and generalists and between experts and novices, and to promote interdisciplinary communication, there is a need to provide methods and tools for doing so. This interdisciplinary research team developed and evaluated a decision support tool (DST) on a personal digital assistant (PDA) for cardiac tele-triage/tele-consultation when the presenting problem was chest pain. The combined human factors methods of cognitive work analysis during the requirements-gathering phase and ecological interface design during the design phase were used to develop the DST.

Effects of a computerized cardiac teletriage decision support system on nurse performance: results of a controlled human factors experiment using a mid-fidelity prototype.

A gap exists in cardiac care between known best practices and the actual level of care administered. To help bridge this gap, a proof of concept interface for a PDA-based decision support system (DSS) was designed for cardiac care nurses engaged in teletriage. This interface was developed through a user-centered design process.

Applications of ecological interface design in supporting the nursing process.

Today's nursing environment is complex, with many sources of data that are often poorly displayed. Ecological interface design (EID) is a systematic approach to designing interfaces to complex systems. EID has been used to design interfaces for aviation displays, power plant monitoring and control, human hemodynamic monitoring, anesthesia monitoring, and neonatal intensive care monitoring and diagnosis.

Patients' understanding of cardiac risk factors: a point-prevalence study.

A 1-day point-prevalence study was conducted in our 141-bed tertiary cardiac care hospital in order to determine our patients' and their significant others' level of understanding of cardiac risk factors in general and of the patients' personal cardiac risk factors. There were 3 parts to the study: patient interviews, significant other (SO) interviews, and an audit of the participating patients' charts. Of the 87 patients who were able to participate, 71 completed the interviews as did 53 significant others.

Audibility and identification of auditory alarms in the operating room and intensive care unit.

The audibility and the identification of 23 auditory alarms in the intensive care unit (ICU) and 26 auditory alarms in the operating rooms (ORs) of a 214-bed Canadian teaching hospital were investigated. Digital tape recordings of the alarms were made and analysed using masked-threshold software developed at the Université de Montréal. The digital recordings were also presented to the hospital personnel responsible for monitoring these alarms on an individual basis in order to determine how many of the alarms they would be able to identify when they heard them.