Facebook account of a picture of an anesthesia monitor displaying a
patient's vitals — "Just sittin here watching the tube on Christmas
morning. Ho ho ho," reads the caption — Dr. Spillers admitted to
sometimes texting and reading his iPad during procedures. The
patient, 61-year-old Roseann Milne, had undergone an AV node abla-
tion, a relatively routine heart procedure. She died 10 hours later.
Lesson learned. Social media distractions in the OR are bad and
must always be prohibited, right?
Maybe not so fast.
Let's consider a couple of points. One is that non-patient-related
activities in the OR are nothing new. Some define anesthesia as 99%
boredom, 1% sheer terror. Anesthesia professionals have been read-
ing, doing crossword puzzles and playing Sudoku in the OR for
decades, without creating any obvious pattern of negative outcomes.
More to the point, can we assume that any distraction during any part
of any case is always a bad thing?
A 2013 MIT study (osmag.net/dawx9u) concluded that military
drone operators, who are often fighter pilots, actually tend to be more
effective if they're distracted from time to time. They spend the vast
majority of their time waiting for something to happen, watching
video screens while drones hover over targets. The study found that
occasional distractions help alleviate their boredom, which keeps
them sharper and more alert when they need to jump into action —
when, for example, a hostile target appears.
Anesthesia providers don't fly drones, but they have something in
common with pilots. For both, "takeoff" and "landing" are virtually
always the most stressful and demanding times. And in between,
there's usually relatively little action.
Sterile cockpit rule
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