Peter Rainger has led over £50 million's worth of clinical task analysis projects (including the value of the end product). Peter has provided medical leadership for over 300 clinical task analyses. Peter has trained over 40 professionals in 3-month training courses on clinical task analysis and he is currently designing an online course to train CTA professionals on a global scale.

Surgigogy offers services in collaboration with a defined clinical professional, subject matter expert or key opinion leader to provide a CTA at the appropriate level of detail to support a wide arrange of uses.

A high-quality CTA is the foundation of patient safety, millions can be spent in the development of clinical simulations but if the primary CTA research is not sufficient or lack definition then millions can be wasted and patients put at risk.

Every clinical procedure consists of a series of clinical phases, clinical objectives and clinical tasks. Undertaking a clinical task analysis (CTA) means creating a complete breakdown of that task in detail subject to the context of the future.

Designing the operatives functions of an autonomous clinical robot requires a consistent extreme level of definition whilst a CTA for the creation of a 3D animation requires a moderate level of definition and writing an operative plan requires a low level of definition.

If you would like to know more about our forthcoming professional development course in CTA please register your interest.

Provided below is a simple illustration of the possible complexity associated with surgical task analysis (a branch of clinical task analysis) and why you might need professional support.

It is worth noting that some procedures like a total joint replacement (within orthopaedics) can consist of over 500 surgical steps.

Surgical plan

  • The primary surgical objective for an optimal patient outcome

    • Surgical phase 1

      • Surgical objective 01

      • Surgical objective X

    • Surgical phase X

  • Patient presentation

  • Pre-operative plan

  • Surgeon preferences for tools and support services

  • Unknown but possible interoperative anatomical variations

  • Unknown but possible interoperative physiological or pathological variations

  • Intra-operative plans for anaesthesia, nursing, imaging, surgical implant specialist etc

  • Plans for unplanned critical events

  • Post-operative plan

Now let's zoom in on one surgical objective and undertake a simplified analysis.

  • Surgical objective 1

    • Surgical task 01

      • Surgical action of primary surgeon

        • Surgical instrument, tool or component

          • Dominant hand

            • State of tool (e.g. active)

            • Hand grip position for use

            • Hand grip position for transfer

          • Non-dominant hand

        • Technique or motion path

          • e.g. curvilinear incision

        • Clinical cues for success, moderation and failure

          • Visual cues

          • Auditory cues

          • Haptic and tactile cues

          • Olfactory cues

        • Key anatomy

        • Criteria for success

        • Possible clinical errors

          • Call for supervision, assistance or hand-over

          • Remediation

            • Addition of extra surgical tasks

            • Additional or re-ordering of extra surgical objectives

            • A significant change in the operative plan

        • Possible complications

      • Surgical action of the assisting clinician

        • ...

    • Surgical task 02

    • Surgical task 03

    • Criterial for successful evaluation of the SO

  • Surgical objective 2

  • Surgical objective 3