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

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.