Perioperative practitioners’ experiences of critical incident debriefing: a qualitative explorative study

Background:
A critical incident is described as any unplanned event which causes, or has the potential to cause, injury to a patient. Critical incident debriefing is a team discussion to gather facts and analyse the experience, evaluate lessons learned and provide staff with support. However, this phase is often neglected.

Methods:
This UK-based explorative qualitative study aims to explore perioperative practitioners’ experiences of critical incident debriefing. Data were collected from six participants through audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using a thematic analysis framework.

Results:
Five themes emerged detailing the advantages of critical incident debriefing, including addressing staff’s personal needs and learning lessons from incidents, and the disadvantages such as time constraints and unsupportive/uninformative debriefs leading to poor-quality debriefs.

Conclusions:
Implementation of a short debrief immediately post-incident to address immediate concerns, a later in-depth debrief and additional training for facilitators were recommended to improve debrief quality.