Necessary teaching or preventable disruption? Reconsidering resident trainee-related workflow interruptions in academic operating rooms
Amirali Alizadeh · 2026
Read Necessary teaching or preventable disruption? Reconsidering resident trainee-related workflow interruptions in academic operating rooms by Amirali Alizadeh (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13401278.txt.
Description
Amirali Alizadeh wrote a 2026 letter to the editor about a study by Kalantari and colleagues that counted workflow interruptions during 251 operations in five academic teaching hospitals. That study logged over fifty thousand minutes of operating room activity and attributed 45 of 319 identified causes, about 14 percent, to teaching and trainees.
Alizadeh argues the harder question is what those trainee-related pauses actually do. The 14.1 percent figure is a share of identified causes, not of the 281 interruption events, since one event could have several causes. A pause might mean poor preparation, slower supervised learning, or a senior surgeon stopping a trainee to prevent harm. Lumping them together, the letter warns, hides whether teaching moments protect patients or simply disrupt work.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Amirali Alizadeh |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 5193 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |