Determining the opinions of the operating room staff on teamwork: A qualitative study

The study was conducted using a qualitative research design to determine operating room staff members' perspectives on teamwork. The study was conducted in a state hospital affiliated with the Ministry of Health in Tekirdağ between November 2021 and February 2022. The population of the study consisted of 44 operating room staff, including 18 operating room nurses, 6 anesthesiologists, and 20 surgeons, working in the operating rooms of the hospital where the study will be conducted. The study included 20 operating room staff who were chosen using criterion sampling. In the study, semi-structured interview form were used to collect data. In the data analysis, the MAXQDA 2020 program was used within the framework of the thematic analysis method. In the operating room, team members defined teamwork as trust, working toward a common goal, job satisfaction, being a chain ring, and working as bees in the beehive. Individual factors affecting teamwork include professional experience, empathy, expressing ideas clearly, emotions, speaking style/accented speech, age, gender differences, and stress management skills; team-related factors include situational awareness, leadership, coordination, cooperation, hierarchy, pre-operative briefings, communication, familiarity with team members, and disruptive behaviors; and environmental factors include heavy operating room traffic, operating room temperature, surgical lighting, physical space inadequacies in the operating room, noise, emergency or elective cases; management factors include long working hours, income inequality, reward/support, lack of equipment, and employee shortage. Teamwork was adversely affected during the COVID-19 pandemic due to staff anxiety, an increase in workload, the use of personal protective equipment, and the assignment of team members to different units.