Human factors affecting intraoperative patient safety

Purpose of review This review addresses the importance of some of the human factors for intraoperative patient safety with particular focus on the active failures. These are the mishaps or sentinel events related to decisons taken and actions performed by the individual at the delivery end of a system. Such sentinel events may greatly affect intraoperative patient safety. Recent findings Intimidating, aggressive and disruptive communication is a cause of adverse staff interaction, which may then represent an important patient safety threat. Also, anaesthesiologist's physical and mental state and limitations may interfere with patient safety. The concept of physician well being is multidimensional and includes factors related to each physician as an individual as well as to the working environment. Creating optimal safe conditions for patients, therefore, requires actions at both the personal level and the working conditions. Also, initiatives to ban rude and dismissive communication should be implemented in order to further improve intraoperative patient safety.