From Burned Out to Ownership: A Participation and Ownership Programme Built on the Listen-Align-Promote Approach for a Multinational Operating Room Team

Abstract

Background: Operating room staff work under time pressure, long standing hours and changing lists, and exhaustion in these teams goes together with unplanned absence and weaker safety performance.
Aim: To assess the effect of a Participation and Ownership Programme, built on the Listen–Align–Promote approach, on staff engagement, sick leave and reported safety incidents among operating room staff of different nationalities over twelve months.
Subjects and Methods: A single-group before-and-after interventional study was carried out over twelve consecutive months in the main operating room complex of a tertiary care hospital, and 150 nursing and allied theatre staff completed both assessments. Engagement was measured with the nine-item Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, burnout with an instrument prepared for operating room staff, and teamwork with a short anonymous questionnaire, while sick leave and reported incidents were drawn from existing unit records for the year before and the year during the programme. The programme ran in three phases, listening, alignment and promotion, joined by a Catalyst Lab in which small staff-led groups tested practical changes through short improvement cycles.
Results: Total engagement rose from 28.6 ± 6.3 to 34.2 ± 5.7 (p < 0.001). Emotional exhaustion fell from 27.0 ± 7.0 to 21.6 ± 6.4 (p < 0.001), depersonalisation fell (p = 0.002) and personal accomplishment rose (p < 0.001). The total teamwork score rose from 24.0 ± 4.4 to 29.6 ± 3.8 (p < 0.001). Sick leave fell from 8.2 ± 3.5 to 7.1 ± 3.0 days (p = 0.012) and reported incidents from 1.2 ± 1.1 to 0.7 ± 0.8 per member of staff (p < 0.001). The gain in engagement did not differ between nationality groups, roles, experience bands or shift patterns (all p > 0.05).
Conclusion: The programme was followed by higher engagement, lower burnout, better teamwork, fewer sick leave days and fewer reported incidents, with gains spread evenly across the multinational team, which supports a unit-level approach that changes how the theatre is run.