Interruptions may force doctors to compromise on care

PATIENTS of doctors who are regularly interrupted by other staff may be getting poorer care, researchers claim.

Doctors have less time overall to spend on their work and face being interrupted by colleagues 6.6 times an hour on average. Being pulled in different directions means doctors fail to return to almost one in five of their jobs, while 11 per cent of all tasks are interrupted, 3.3 per cent of them more than once.

Doctors are forced to multitask for 13 per cent of the time and the average time spent on a job is 1.26 minutes, the research found. When doctors return to tasks following an interruption, they spend less time on them than if they had never been stopped.

And when colleagues stop doctors to ask a question, the doctor then completes the task in about half the time they would have spent otherwise.

A University of Sydney team followed 40 doctors in the A&E department of a large hospital for the research, published in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care.

Previous research by the same team has shown that when hospital nurses are interrupted, the rate of medicine errors significantly increases.

"Thus, the uncontrolled and untrained use of interruptions in clinical practice is an expensive and dangerous strategy, and the need to develop clinical processes that minimise unnecessary interruption and multi-tasking is strong," they said.