Video Clips as a Data Source for Safety Performance

Abstract

Improved safety is an important goal, but there is difficulty in gathering data and identifying practices that lessen the margin of patient safety in real dynamic complex medical workplaces. Video clips as data are a rich source to examine safety performance. Video clips have utility for participants to review their activities and for analysts to extract quantitative data. Focusing video data collection around brief, risky but beneficial tasks, to illustrate patterns of use that occur in Trauma Centers during patients' resuscitation, can simplify participation consent, confidentiality and data analysis problems. However such video clip acquisition (5–15 minute duration) does not appear to compromise the quality of the content, that can facilitate identification of team performance, communication, ergonomic, and systems factors affecting patient safety. Comparisons of task performance under two levels of task urgency was particularly revealing of areas where patient safety performance can be improved and allowed identification of preventive strategies to minimize the effects of safety infractions.