Grant: Team Grant: Impact of Gender on Knowledge Translation Interventions

Effective teamwork in the operating room (OR) is essential to surgical patient safety and improved health outcomes. Interventions to promote evidence-based practice have been shown to effectively improve teamwork in the OR to some degree. Yet, investigations of OR teamwork have overlooked the role of gender in OR teamwork, despite evidence from other areas of healthcare demonstrating its relevance to team interactions, practice patterns, care delivery, and patient outcomes. Without this knowledge, interventions to optimize teamwork have remained "gender neutral" (i.e. have not considered how gender may influence teamwork skills as well as barriers and facilitators for attaining these skills). The study of gender and teamwork in the OR has largely been limited by the practical challenges associated with obtaining high-quality OR data. Our group belongs to the international Surgical Safety Network, which uses OR Black Box technology to improve practice in the OR and obtain the best possible outcomes for all patients. Like black boxes used in aviation, the OR Black Box is an innovative tool that records detailed information from the surgical environment (e.g. audio, video, patient vitals). We plan to use the OR Black Box as part of a mixed methods study to: (1) describe variation in teamwork by gender and its impact on patient outcomes, and (2) determine the impact of gender on teamwork skills, barriers, and facilitators to enhance the effectiveness of teamwork interventions in the OR. This novel contribution will increase our understanding about how gender influences OR teamwork and its barriers and facilitators, and the findings will inform future interventions to improve teamwork through incorporating a gender perspective. Our study is a critical first step to the responsible implementation of teamwork interventions that consider gender and will enable comparisons of effectiveness between these interventions and those that do not take a gender perspective.