This study on surgical team members’ autonomic nervous system responses during high and low-risk surgeries found that attending surgeons had faster heart rate responses than trainees and nurses during high-risk procedures, residents were less responsive in high-risk situations, and attending doctors demonstrated increased sensitivity to risk as a stress coping mechanism, while residents and nurses did not show similar well-matched responses.
The following is a summary of “How Does Surgeons’ Autonomic Physiology Vary Intraoperatively? A Real-time Study of Cardiac Reactivity” published in the February 2024 issue of Surgery by Rosario, et al.
For a study, researchers sought to find out how the members of the surgical team’s bodies reacted to different amounts of risk during the surgery. Tracking bodily reactions during surgery gives them information on how the operation’s difficulty, the surgery’s stage, and the surgeon’s experience affect stress. Responses of the autonomic nervous system (interbeat intervals, IBIs) were constantly recorded during complicated surgery procedures. In this study, they looked at how professional jobs (example, attending surgeons), operating risks (high vs. low), and the type of main operator (attending surgeon vs. trainee) affected IBI response. The level of similarity between people’s physiological reactions at any given time was measured by physiological synchrony.
One thousand five hundred observations of IBI response were made on 26 people during 16 high-risk (renal transplant and laparoscopic donor nephrectomy) and low-risk (arteriovenous fistula formation) surgeries. It was found that attending surgeons had a faster IBI response (faster heart rate) than trainees and nurses during high-risk operations and while they were actually working (Ps<0.001).
Residents were less responsive during high-risk operations compared to low-risk ones (P<0.001), but they were responsive whether they were operating or the visiting surgeon was (P=0.10). The nurses’ reactions were the same during low-risk and high-risk operations (P=0.102), but they were more alert when the trainee was operating than when the visiting surgeon was the main operator (P<0.001). During high-risk surgeries, doctors in charge had negative physiological covariation with nurses and trainees (P<0.001). Only the attending doctors and nurses were in sync during low-risk operations (P<0.001). The bodily reactions of the attending doctors were well-matched to the needs of the surgery. The answers of the residents and nurses were not praised in the same way. This shows that doctors become more sensitive to risk as a way to deal with stress.