Participant’s personal examples of negative feedback in the operating theatre
| Type of negative feedback | Illustrative quote |
| Criticism | ‘A particular trainer who was quick to, again not someone from whom you hear positive feedback very often but who was very quick to criticise pretty much anything and everything about the way you work’. (ID 1) |
| Victimisation | ‘It became a very personal attack about a lack of interest, a lack of effort and lots of things which weren’t really particularly fair. At the same time as then to concentrate on operating and I just found that whole sort of case uncomfortable’. (ID 9) |
| Undermining | ‘He said (the trainer) something on the lines of, I showed you how to do it last time and it’s quite disappointing that you still haven’t learned’. (ID 5) |
| Poor communication | ‘I have sat down with this trainer on multiple occasions following these incidents and still been left wondering why, wondering what I was doing wrong…’ (ID 2) |
| Condescending remarks | ‘If I’d had my twelve-year-old boy here, my twelve-year-old son, he would do a better job of the procedure than you right now’. (ID 11) |
| Swearing | ‘He was like what the f**k are you doing, why are you playing around with the laparoscope…this is an emergency patient that unwell why didn’t you just do it open and, and he just, and he just walked away’. (ID 3) |
| Physical abuse | ‘I was just trying to be a dynamic assistant and retract the tissue when he hit me on my wrist with a Langenbeck retractor’. (ID 6) |
| Trainer creating a bad atmosphere | ‘It was a tense environment and everyone was tense because the surgeon had been, just generally being angry and then he shouted to me ‘stop shaking’. (ID 4) |
| Repeat offender | ‘He has a reputation for being a generally a bully and I kind of knew that before going there, but I hadn’t realised how bad he was until I actually got there. The first time he met me he started off by slagging off the previous trainee that he had for a year, and how terrible and how lazy he was’. (ID 11) |
ID, identification.