Patricia Trbovich

The Operating Room Black Box (ORBB), which records audio/video of surgical procedures over time, as well as vital signs and feedback from electronic surgical instruments, allows hospitals to rigorously study how errors come about and how they are prevented. In this presentation, Patricia will discuss how her team of human factors researchers uses the ORBB to examine the factors that influence behaviours, including the design of tools/technology, tasks, environments and teamwork.

Speaker biography: 

Patricia Trbovich is Associate Professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and cross appointed at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. She holds the Badeau Family Research Chair in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement at North York General Hospital. She is the Research and Scholarship lead, Centre for Quality Improvement & Patient Safety (CQuIPS).

Prof. Trbovich leads HumanEra, a team of human factors researchers dedicated to studying and improving safety and performance in health care. Her current research includes two Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded projects; one focused on improving opioid guidance for Canadian hospitals and a second focused on improving surgical safety by reducing safety threats and enhancing resilience supports. She also holds a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) grant focused on operator decision making during uncertainty in surgery, using the Operating Room Black Box.

She has promoted knowledge of human factors engineering worldwide through her collaborations with researchers in Brazil and Spain to develop human factors expertise in their healthcare systems. She is also Associate Editor for the BMJ Quality and Safety journal.