Principal Investigator

This is a prospective study to survey the stress upon anesthesia personnel and verify causes and risk factors to their stress. A message of persuading is conducted among the anesthesia personnel in university, municipal and private hospitals. We ask participants to voluntarily response all items in questionnaires of the SST and SAST.

We launch a communication channel with the anesthesia personnel at www.nmac.in.th and require that qualified participants register and express their intention to join this research project. Each registered participant receives an identification number and a log-in password to the website containing the SST and SAST courseware database. The program is interactive, with personal files for each participant on each test along with other details like code, password, date-month-year, test scores, and log-in periods and time.

We introduced the 20 questionnaires of the SST courseware, to the developed system via http://www.dmh.go.th/test/stress/ before performing it under the research approach via www.nmac.in.th website. The findings revealed that the system operating units were flexible to participants' interactive behavior, instruction and responsiveness. Access to the system through the website provided ready access to the information, was user-friendly, and was stable. In addition, the tools were objective, covered complete details, and were clear, with elements of the subject content in proper order.

1. SST courseware comprises of 60 questionnaires with scoring through five choices: most stressful (5), highly stressful (4), moderately stressful (3), mildly stressful (2), and no stressful (1).

In addition, the tests underwent verification for content validity and had index of item objective congruence (IOC) determined by experts; with > 0.8 in Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient; r > 0.27 in concurrent validity through calculation of Pearson Product moment correlation against an electromyogram biofeedback. 2. SAST courseware comprises of 6 sections with scoring through visual analog scale and allowing open-ended opinions. The questionnaires had undergone quality analysis and verification for conciseness, accuracy, and clarity, as well as content and structural validity by three doctorate educational experts with at least a decade of teaching experience. The questionnaires' IOC was 0.79. The open-ended questionnaire is composed of the following sections: (1) background data: age, gender, experience in anesthesia; (2) working data: working time, overnight job, numbers of call; (3) personal data: sleeping time; (4) patient safety issues: frequency of various situations involving unsafe actions, occurrence of operating room events; (5) attitudes toward production pressure: depression, fatigue, confusion, tension/anxiety, and anger; and (6) ratings of sources of production pressure.