Awareness of Human Factors in the operating theatres during the COVID-19 pandemic

One of the priorities at our large Operating Theatres Department is to support awareness and basic education of the multi-disciplinary teams in clinical Human Factors, to help build competence and capacity in healthcare towards a resilient system. From May 2019 until February 2020, our Human Factors Champions embarked on a project called Observation of Non-technical Skills and Teamwork in the operating theatres (ONSeT), to monitor and evaluate the benefits of local Human Factors education. In September 2020, six months after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK and caused a major disruption of surgical services, we decided to investigate the usefulness of the project and the impact of COVID-19 in the operating theatres, looking through the eyes of the Human Factors Champions. Results pointed to a consensus about ONSeT having helped during the pandemic, with regards to how teams worked and in enabling team leaders to be more responsive. Human Factors Champions found that feedback on performance was received in a non-threatening way and observation of performance became ‘second nature’. As organisations need to develop critical thinking, we think that the ONSeT project has helped us build some capacity for this, from the front-line onwards.