Professional Role, Access to Digital Educational Resources, and the Appraisal of Digitalization in Anesthesia and Intensive Care: A Single-Centre Cross-Sectional Survey of Staff Perceptions

Background and Objectives: Digital tools are now embedded in anesthesia and intensive care, but access to them, and in particular to digital educational resources, is distributed unevenly across professional groups. This study describes how nurses, residents, and specialist physicians in one department appraise the contribution of digital technologies to continuing education, patient safety, and clinical and managerial decision-making, and how they report using the digital educational resources available to them. The study is descriptive and exploratory. It does not evaluate an educational intervention and does not measure learning. Methods: We conducted an anonymous, paper-based cross-sectional survey of all 198 clinical staff of a tertiary anesthesia and intensive care department between 2 June and 31 July 2025; 161 questionnaires were analyzable (81.3%). The instrument was investigator-developed and has not been validated, and it is therefore treated as a set of individual items rather than as a scale. Four trichotomous items (Yes/No/Cannot appraise) covering continuing education, patient safety, clinical decision-making, and managerial decision-making were designated primary outcomes and are reported as proportions with Wilson 95% confidence intervals, together with between-group differences and their confidence intervals; overall comparisons used the chi-square or Fisher exact test with Cramér’s V as the effect size. Reporting follows STROBE and the CROSS checklist for survey research. Composite indices, regression models, and correlation analyses were devised after data inspection, are labelled exploratory, and are not reported in this manuscript. Results: Daily use of at least one digital tool was reported by 98.1% of respondents. An educational contribution was affirmed by 56.4% of nurses (95% CI 43.3–68.6), 91.9% of residents (82.5–96.5), and 93.2% of specialists (81.8–97.7); the difference was 35.5 percentage points between residents and nurses (95% CI 20.1–49.4) and 36.8 points between specialists and nurses (20.1–50.7). Response distributions differed by professional category on all four items (p < 0.001 for education, patient safety, and clinical decisions; p = 0.005 for managerial decisions; Cramér’s V 0.22–0.31). Explicit disagreement was very rare (1 to 4 respondents per item), so the differences consist almost entirely of the “Cannot appraise” category, which is reported descriptively because the reason for that response was not measured. Reported use of digital educational resources followed the same ordering: e-learning 50.9% of nurses, 98.4% of residents, 93.2% of specialists; simulators 18.2%, 72.6%, 50.0%; webinars 65.5%, 67.7%, 86.4%. These proportions correspond to documented differences in institutional access, since simulation rotations were mandatory for residents only and the e-learning platform was opened to physicians in 2021 but to nursing staff only in October 2023. Conclusions: In this single department, response distributions on all four appraisal items differed by professional category, and reported use of digital educational resources was lowest in the group with the latest and most restricted institutional access. Because the groups used different technologies under different access conditions, these differences cannot be attributed to professional role itself, and because no learning outcome was measured they are not evidence of educational benefit. The findings are exploratory and support the hypothesis that equalizing access to digital educational resources deserves prospective evaluation.