Investigating the Relationship between Surgeon's Mental Workload and Their Productivity: Validation of "Surgeon-TLX" Tool in Iranian Surgeons.

The importance of surgery and its high workload are not hidden from anyone. So far, various studies have been conducted with the NASA-TLX instrument and other commonly used instruments to measure surgeons’ workload. The present study seeks to investigate the relationship between the mental workload of surgeons and their productivity through the validation of specialized tools for this job in Iranian culture.

After checking the validity and reliability of "SURG-TLX" and productivity tools, they were utilized among 60 surgeons to investigate the relationship between their workload and productivity (WHO-HPQ tool). Content validity indices, Cronbach's alpha coefficient and Spearman's correlation coefficient were used to analyse the results.

Both tools had good validity and reliability in Iranian culture. The results of the relationship between mental workload subscales with different dimensions of productivity showed that some dimensions of mental workload including mental needs (correlation coefficient -0.65 and significance level 0.02), physical needs (correlation coefficient -0.54 and significance level 0.04) and time requirements (correlation coefficient -0.44 and significance level 0.02) had a reverse and significant relationship with the overall productivity score. Despite the reverse relationship between the other dimensions of mental workload and the overall productivity score in surgeons, this relationship was not statistically significant. The results indicated a reverse and significant relationship between some of the mental workload and some of the productivity subscales.

In addition to the possibility of using these tools in the future studies in Iran, due to the direct relationship between workload and productivity in surgeons, measures can be taken to maintain the workload at a standard level and prevent the reduction of their productivity.