Hospital doctors who are frequently interrupted while working in a clinical environment spend less time on tasks and fail to return to almost a fifth of their jobs, research reveals.
The study finds that on average doctors were interrupted 6.6 times an hour and 11% of all tasks were interrupted.
These interruptions - such as a doctor being asked a question by a colleague while they were trying to write a prescription - meant that doctors, when they did return to the job in hand, tended to spend less time on it than if they had carried out the task with no pause.
For tasks with one interruption, doctors tended to complete the task in about half the time they would have spent if they had not been interrupted.
The authors speculate, in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care, that one reason for the quicker completion of a task that had been interrupted was that doctors decided to work more quickly to compensate for the time spent dealing with the interruption.
However, in almost a fifth of cases (18.5%), doctors failed to return to the task they had been working on before being interrupted.
Interruptions happened most often during documentation (around 43%) and direct and indirect care (17% and 19% respectively). Doctors were least likely to be interrupted when taking part in professional communication or social activities.
Many fear that repeated interruptions raise the likelihood of clinical errors being made.
The study, conducted in the emergency department of a 400-bed teaching hospital in Australia, shows that doctors multi-tasked for 12.8% of the time and the average time spent on a task was 1.26 minutes.
The authors conclude: “Our results support the hypothesis that the highly interruptive nature of busy clinical environments may have a negative effect on patient safety.
“Task shortening may occur because interrupted tasks are truncated to ‘catch up’ for lost time, which may have significant implications for patient safety.”
Read the full research.
Tags: Patient safety
