Distribution and Determinants of Non-Nursing Workload Among Operating Room Nurses: A Cross-Sectional Time-and-Motion Equity Analysis

This record accompanies a single-centre, cross-sectional time-and-motion study quantifying the distribution of non-nursing workload among operating room nurses and testing whether any inequity in that distribution is explained by clinical experience. Continuous task-level observations were captured with a structured workload-visualisation system and classified as nursing, non-nursing, or break using a predefined 38-item taxonomy. To remove the confounding effect of unequal observation length, analyses were restricted to standard weekday day shifts and aggregated to a per-nurse daily mean. The primary outcome was the share of working time spent on non-nursing tasks. Inequality was summarised with the Gini coefficient and Lorenz curves; differences across four experience bands were tested with the Kruskal-Wallis test and Spearman correlation. Total daily working time was distributed almost equally, whereas the share of non-nursing work was highly unequal and ranged more than sixfold across individuals, with no monotonic relationship to seniority. The findings indicate that operating room nurses worked near-identical total hours, but the composition of that work — specifically the non-nursing burden — was distributed inequitably and was not explained by clinical experience. Reporting followed the STROBE checklist for cross-sectional studies.