Distractions per handoff, broken down into those nonessential for patient care (extraneous staff leaving or entering the room, unrelated side conversations, and television or music playing); and those essential to patient care (phones ringing, overhead pages, pagers beeping, monitors alarming, and equipment failures); and those that engaged the attention of a process participant and those that did not. The total number of distractions in each handoff, distractions per minute of communication, and the percentage of the total number of distractions are noted.