The negative effect of distraction on performance of robot‐assisted surgical skills in medical students and residents

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Modern surgical practice often requires multitasking in operating rooms, generally full of distractions. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of distraction on robot-assisted surgical skill performance in medical students and residents. METHODS: Fourteen subjects performed a suture-tying task with the da Vinci(™) surgical system with distractive secondary tasks simultaneously. The time to task completion, speed and the total distance travelled were analysed. Two-way repeated-measures ANOVA were applied. The scores of secondary tasks were analysed. RESULTS: A significant secondary task effect was found with an increase of the time to task completion (p = 0.003) and decreased average speed (p < 0.001). The performance of secondary task for residents was significantly better than students. CONCLUSIONS: The performance of a robot-assisted surgical task was negatively affected by secondary tasks. However, residents with more surgical experience demonstrated a larger attention capacity for multitasking. Therefore, understanding how medical trainees respond to the distractive secondary tasks while performing robot-assisted surgical task is important in developing a surgical training programme based on the concept of attention.