“Shh-Don’t say the Q-word” or do you?

Abstract Purpose Assessment of the superstitious belief that saying the word “quiet” during an on-call period in Oral and Maxillofacial surgery (OMFS) causes a disproportionate increase in work-load. Methods A 2-armed, single centre randomised trial was performed in a single-blinded fashion within the OMFS department at Addenbrookes hospital, Cambridge. Duty on-call OMFS SHO's were assigned to a “quiet group” and “Non-quiet group”. Former group actively told on-call period would be quiet whilst this word was refrained from use in all contexts in the latter. Results Data was collected from 8am to 7pm from a period spanning a total of 40 week-day on-calls. Total number of bleeps encountered was 491, average bleep count per day irrespective of treatment was 12.3 (SD 4.6). Bleep count for the control group and 13.1 (4.9) bleeps for the quiet (treatment) group. Welches independent-sample T test identified no significant difference in the mean number of bleeps encountered between treatment and control groups. Moreover, ANOVA identified no significant difference in mean number of bleeps between days (F(4,35) = 0.086, p = 0.986). Statistical analysis was performed using R version 3.6.2 Conclusion Our study refutes the central dogma of all of medicine that suggests saying the word quiet increases clinician workload during the working day. We identified no significant difference in bleep number between different days of the week. OMFS sees a large breadth of presentations within the head & neck arena requiring a diverse set of skills to manage the varying presentations on-call.