Interruptions on Clinical Task Completion.)

¶ … interruptions on clinical task completion.)

The title of the article, "The impact of interruptions on clinical task completion," is particularly apt to the study being described, as it summarizes precisely what the study will cover. The main concern of the study is indeed to determine the impacts that interruptions during the medical personnel function in clinics have on the effectiveness of this function. In addition, the title is also very simple, providing the reader with no doubt regarding the direction, focus, and key concepts to be covered.

There are seven authors involved in the study. This is beneficial for a study of this kind, since collaboration also entails a collaboration of various types and ranges of expertise. Hence, bias in the study is minimized. Furthermore, the authors' credentials are listed as footnotes at the beginning of the study. They are all affiliated with professional, academic institutions in the field of study, ranging from the health sciences and brain studies to statistics and emergency services. A wide range of relevant expertise is therefore involved in conducting this study.

The article begins with an abstract that provides a summary of the major sections to be covered, including the background, objective, methods, and results of the study. These include a brief statement regarding the premise of the study, the way in which the study was conducted, the main findings, and the conclusions that resulted. The findings include a summarizing set of statistics, which provided a sense of specificity to the abstract.

In general, I feel that the abstract provided an excellent premise for further reading to obtain more details regarding the specific methodology and discussion relating to the stated results.

The introduction of the article provides an excellent premise for the research. The main stated problem or area of concern, as mentioned by the authors, is the tendency of the hospital environment to be fraught with interruptions and high multitasking loads. The main premise is that these requirements have a tendency to affect the efficiency of patient care and even, in extreme cases, patient mortality or at least well-being. In general, these interruptions could cause clinical error, which is the basis for the study. The main research question is to what extent such clinical error occurs as a direct result of the multitasking requirements and interruption rates during the professional process of doctors and nurses in the hospital environment.

Importantly, the introduction also points out that there is only a limited understanding of the connection between interruptions and clinical errors in the hospital setting, although such errors in other professions, including aviation and other industries, have been proven by empirical study. Because the hospital setting has a direct impact upon human health and mortality, the importance of the study is both implicitly and explicitly stated.

The Method section begins with a clear statement of the sample size, which includes 40 of the 44 doctors working on weekdays between 8:00 and 18:00. The time and duration of the study are also clearly noted, with an indication that the sample population provided written consent to be part of the study. The number of observation sessions, their duration and nature are also clearly stated, along with the exact field of professional focus that study participants engaged in during these observations.

Reliability was addressed by means of inter-rater reliability tests, which achieved an 88% or higher agreement on data items between the study and test observers. The section also noted the approval of the study by the hospital and the university of New South Wales Human Research Ethics. Indeed, the Methods section appears to have covered all the aspects involved in working with human and health subjects in the medical field. Reliability, ethics, and consent were addressed by the study before proceeding with the study, obtaining results, and publishing the premise and results of the study.

The results of a study like this always poses considerable challenges, including how to logically as well as accurately presenting the statistics and discussion of the results. This is where the statistical experts involved in the study clearly provided their assistance. The results begin with a description fo the total time, number of individual task actions recorded, and total TOT. The main finding was that an average of 12.8% of physician time was spent multitasking. The discussion also made clear distinctions between the task types completed as well as the seniority of physicians. Specific interruption rates were recorded for each task category and seniority level as well as expertise were also recorded. Hence, the central premise and hypothesis of the article was substantiated by the findings, each of which related to a very specific and clear category. Interestingly, the main result supported the premise that an increase of interruptions also resulted in an increase in task compromise or error, regardless of expertise or seniority level of the professionals involved.

The tables are well positioned throughout the Results section, completing the information presented in the narrative of the section. These include the specific statistics that inform the results and further discussion of the study. Furthermore, the complexity level increases throughout the section, with complex calculations at the end of the Results section informed by the more basic statistical information provided at the beginnings.

The Discussion section begins with a brief summary of the statistical findings presented in the Results section. This is followed by a brief consideration of the remedies that physicians themselves created for their task completion rates, as well as those suggested by the findings of the study. This section also includes other similar investigations to inform the findings of the current study, as well as to suggest possible remedies for the challenges faced within the hospital setting.

Importantly, the section also includes two subsections; one that provides a consideration of the study's limitations, and the other a suggestion for future investigation. The fact that these two sections warranted a focus of their own indicates the relative lack of research attention that has been given to the specific premise of the study. One specific limitation was the relatively narrow scope of the investigation, including only one organization of focus. Hence, there is no differentiation in terms of work organization or internal culture, which could influence the results. This in itself is a basis to warrant further study. To mitigate this limitation, numerous other studies were sued for comparison purposes.