Proposing Design Evaluation Metrics for Anesthesia Providers’ Workspace in Ambulatory Surgical Settings

Objective: This paper describes the development and utilization of two design evaluation metrics aimed to measure design performance for improving circulation and workflow, situational awareness, and visibility for medication-related activities for anesthesia providers’ within their workspace in operating rooms. Background: Proactive performance evaluation of the design of critical areas such as operating rooms can help improve the safety of patients and staff workflows. This paper builds on previous work on task-switching behaviors in anesthesia workspaces to develop performance-based design evaluation metrics for anesthesia providers’ workspaces based on their tasks performed during the patient preparation, intra-operative, and post-operative phases of the surgery, considering the presence of multiple anesthesia providers. Methods: Pre-coded observational data for five ear, nose, and throat surgeries was analyzed to determine the task-location and task-durations for anesthesia providers while performing various medication-related tasks. The distance between task-locations and the frequency of anesthesia providers’ movement between these locations informed the proximity metric, whereas the anesthesia providers’ visibility of the patient and the vitals screen from these locations informed the visibility metric. These metrics were used to compare four anesthesia providers’ workspace layouts: observed operating room, prototype operating room, and two newly developed design configurations A1 and A2. Results: The proximity metric suggests that layout A2 supported better circulation and workflow for anesthesia providers, whereas the visibility metric indicated that they had improved situational awareness in both A1 and A2. Conclusions: Both metrics can be used to proactively evaluate anesthesia providers’ workspaces early in the design process, to improve patient care in future operating rooms.