Circulating nurse´s non-technical skills: a literature review

Abstract Background: Circulating nurses are key members of the surgical team and play an essential role in ensuring patient safety in the operating room. They need to use non-technical skills to provide safe and efficient patient care. This study was conducted to identify the behaviors related to the circulating nurse´s nontechnical skills from the existing literature.Methods: A search of the literature between 1990 and 2020 was conducted using online sources, including Web of Science, MEDLINE, CINHAL, Scopus, OVID, and Cochran library. Furthermore, the publications of the Association of peri-operative registered nurses (AORN) and the National Association of Theater Nurses (NATH) were consulted. Then the skills were grouped into known categories of non-technical skills.Results: Behaviors related to circulating nurse´s non-technical skills were extracted from the existing literature. Then they were grouped into seven domains, including communication, leadership, coping, teamwork, situational awareness, task management, and decision-making and problem-solving. Furthermore, several improper behaviors were extracted.Conclusion: Circulating nurses need to use non-technical skills from the beginning until the end of surgery to perform efficiently. There is still a need for future work to identifying circulating nurses’ non-technical skills using other types of studies to develop an assessment tool.