Table 3.

Survey responses stratified by Department^#

	Anesthesia n = 24	Surgery n = 68	P-value
Readbacks would significantly reduce verbal communication errors and improve patient safety	5 (4–5)	5 (4–5)	0.10
Readbacks are currently being used appropriately by the surgical staff in our hospital	4 (3.5-4)	4 (3–4)	0.77
I would attend a short training module on readbacks should the concept be formally implemented	4 (3–5)	4 (3–5)	0.74
Readbacks would be helpful in reducing verbal communication errors when …
… a request is made to carry out an important task that has implications on safety of the patient	5 (4–5)	5 (4–5)	0.86
… there is a handoff of a surgical patient from the care of one provider to another	4.5 (4–5)	4.5 (4–5)	0.87
… used to count and verify surgical instruments and other items	5 (4–5)	5 (4–5)	0.07
… there are multiple perioperative tasks	4 (4–5)	4.5 (4–5)	0.86
Significant barriers to implementation of readbacks in the perioperative setting include …
… the lack of a general “safety culture” in the surgical department	2 (1–3)	2 (1–3)	0.84
… the availability of time to perform readback statements	4 (3–4)	4 (2–4)	0.54
… general reluctance of parts of the surgical team to use readbacks	4 (3–4)	3 (2–4)	0.07
… the amount of training for staff that will be needed to implement readbacks	2 (2–3)	3 (2–3)	0.13
… the difficulty in deciding what type of communication should constitute a readback	4 (2–4)	4 (2–4)	0.78

^# Data are shown as medians and interquartile ranges.

Survey scale:

1 = strongly disagree; 2 = somewhat disagree; 3 = neutral; 4 = somewhat agree; 5 = strongly agree.