Safer Surgery part 47 potx

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healthcare. He has suggested that the future of healthcare is to reform the working
relationships that exist throughout our systems, and he probably has the right idea.
Without addressing the underlying dysfunction of the work environment in this
industry, without addressing interprofessional friction, and without addressing
organizational issues in how we encourage (or fail to encourage) optimal team
performance, it is difcult to see how behavioural marker-based, CRM-oriented
team training programmes will take hold and be able to deliver their potential in
improving the quality of care that is delivered in our current systems.
So, looking back, what was it that made me worry that adapting CRM and
similar practices from aviation would fail to produce the benets that many had
expected? It was the suspicion that CRM alone was too easy a solution to the
complex problems that surround medical error and team dysfunction. Physician,
surgeon, and nursing cultures have evolved to function within the systems in which
they operate, and indeed have created key elements of the very system itself. Well-
designed CRM programmes may address some of the issues that arise in those
teams, and may provide a safety net that traps potential errors before they occur.
But will a training programme, once delivered, continue to inuence behaviour in
any one setting or surgical unit? Possibly, but our experience from aviation and
our early experience from healthcare suggests the impact of training may quickly
decay. If the programme itself suffers from a perceived lack of relevance, then its
decay will be almost immediate.
So, how do we ensure that trained safety behaviours persist? How do we make
training relevant to front-line personnel? To be relevant, programmes must be well
designed conceptually and must address practical issues in the environment in
which they are introduced. Basing such training programmes on front-line safety
and error data was responsible for major improvements in the effectiveness of CRM
in aviation. Often now called threat and error management (or TEM), this most
recent variant of CRM is more proactive, more relevant and likely more effective
than earlier generations of training. Does this mean that behavioural markers are no

longer pertinent? Certainly not; they still form the foundation of CRM and TEM.
Markers represent the behavioural tools that good crews and good practitioners
continue to use to manage and perform in effective teams, but behavioural markers
alone do not a training programme make. Continually incorporated front-line data
allow course designers and trainers to shape programmes and produce training
products that are not only more effective, but also more likely to be perceived
as effective by front-line personnel. In a sense, data tell one where and when to
apply CRM, and tells the organization where to restructure operations to improve
safety.
In healthcare, we often lack the data for any given organization that tells
us where vulnerabilities lie. We also often lack the understanding of what the
underlying cultural issues are at work below the surface that leads to the problems
in team performance we see all too frequently. This book describes some of the
best research currently being done in the area of behavioural markers in surgical
and other healthcare settings. For those of us who now seem to be spending more
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435
time on the training and education side of the equation, the question becomes what
do we do with the outcomes of this impressive body of research? Somewhere
between xing the underlying dysfunctional cultural of healthcare and nding
a way of measuring what goes wrong on the front lines of healthcare delivery,
training programmes to improve teamwork represent the future of improved
healthcare quality. Behavioural markers will be the key to those programmes, and
improved team culture will be the fertile ground on which they will take root.
References
Fletcher, G., Flin, R., McGeorge, P., Glavin, R., Maran, N. and Patey, R. (2003)
Anaesthetists’ Non-Technical Skills (ANTS): Evaluation of a behavioural
marker system. British Journal of Anesthesia 90, 580–8.
Gaba, D.M., Howard, S.K., Fish, K.J., Yang, G. and Sarnquist, F. (1992) Anesthesia
crisis resource management training: Teaching anesthesiologists to handle

critical incidents. Aviation Space and Environmental Medicine 63, 763–70.
Helmreich, R.L., Schaefer, H.G. and Bogner, M.S. (1994) Team performance
in the operating room. Human Error in Medicine. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Helmreich, R.L., Klinect, J.R., Wilhelm, J., Tesmer, B., Gunther, D., Thomas, R.,
Romeo, C., Sumwalt, R. and Maurino, D. (2002) Line Operations Safety Audit
(LOSA). Montreal. Available at: < />group/HelmreichLAB/Aviation/LOSA/LOSA.html> [last accessed June
2009].
Kohn, L.T., Corrigan, J. and Donaldson, M.S. (2000) To Err is Human: Building a
Safer Health System. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Morey, J., Simon, R., Jay, G., Wears, R., Salisbury, M., Dukes, K. and Berns,
S. (2002) Error reduction and performance improvement in the emergency
department through formal teamwork training: Evaluation results of the
MedTeams Project. Health Services Research 37, 1553–81.
Musson, D. M. and Helmreich, R.L. (2004) Team training and resource management
in healthcare: Current issues and future directions. Harvard Health Policy
Review 5, 25–35.
Salas, E., Burke, C.S., Bowers, C.A. and Wilson, K.A. (1999) Team training in the
skies: Does crew resource management (CRM) training work? Human Factors
43, 641–74.
Salas, E., Wilson, K.A., Burke, C.S. and Wightman, D.C. (2006) Does crew
resource management training work? An update, an extension, and some
critical needs. Human Factors 48, 392–412.
WHO (2008) World Alliance for Patient Safety. WHO Guidelines for Safe Surgery.
Geneva: World Health Organization.
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Chapter 26
Commentary and Clinical Perspective
Paul Uhlig
Introduction

Eight years ago the cardiac surgery team that I led at Concord Hospital, Concord,
New Hampshire, began a remarkable association with an expert in aviation safety
and human factors science.
I remember the rst day that Jeff Brown accompanied our care team as we
made rounds in the ICU and on the post-operative oor. During the course of the
morning Jeff made many notes on a yellow legal pad as he watched and listened
attentively. I was very curious about what he was observing and writing.
Later a small group of us sat down with Jeff to review his observations. It
became quickly apparent that Jeff was interpreting the work of our team from
a conceptual framework we had never heard of before. It was humbling and
surprising to learn from Jeff about safety science, high reliability organization
theory and what is known about optimum teamwork in high risk settings. We
literally had no idea.
Over time our care team undertook the challenge of translating these concepts
of safety and high reliability into our daily interactions and work processes. We
began having weekly team meetings. We started making rounds together each
day using a consistent method of information sharing and action planning that
we called the ‘collaborative communications cycle’. We took steps to lower the
hierarchy of our team to actively protect and seek out the insights of the quietest
voices on our team. We built in ways of reecting together about our work so we
could identify problems together and correct them at a system level. We involved
patients and family members in ways we had never considered before.
As we adopted these new ways of working together many things changed. Our
outcomes became measurably better in multiple dimensions – safety, efciency,
patient satisfaction and professional satisfaction. Our thinking changed, from an
individual emphasis to a system focus. Other things changed as well: how we felt
about each other and about our work, and even what we considered important.
Our patients told us they had never experienced anything like this before, and
never wanted us to go back to the old ways. Our team received the Eisenberg Patient
Safety Award, the highest award in patient safety given by the Joint Commission

on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the National Quality Forum
(The Joint Commission 2008). It is fair to say that my life as a surgeon has never
been the same since.
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Pioneering Work
I am reminded of these experiences as I reect about the research studies reported
in this book. The time is exactly right for the kind of pioneering scholarship
presented here. The authors of these studies are scholars who, like Jeff Brown,
are working at the frontiers of their disciplines, translating safety science into the
day-to-day interactions of healthcare teams.
Healthcare is at a crucial juncture – time-honoured ways of working are
insufcient to meet evolving needs of patients and society, yet new ways of
working have not been invented yet. It is increasingly clear that challenges of
safety, quality, cost, access and other important concerns in healthcare will be
solved only from new perspectives leading to transformation of care processes.
It is not sufcient to trade one goal against another. New approaches are needed
that achieve all of these goals at the same time: improved safety, higher quality,
lower cost, greater access and better experiences of care for patients, families and
practitioners alike.
These goals will not be achieved by asking healthcare practitioners to work
harder. People in healthcare are already working as hard as they can. Rather,
these goals will be achieved by nding ways to work and relate differently. It is
important to realize that ‘modern scientic medical practice’ is over one hundred
years old. Organizational structures and practice models that were breakthroughs
years ago no longer serve us well. Healthcare needs truly fresh ideas and methods.
Healthcare needs innovation.
Two things are certain about innovation: it is hard work, and it is always
surprising. Of course, that is the nature of innovation: by denition innovation
means doing things in ways that have not been done before. Creating innovation

in healthcare is exciting, hopeful, meaningful work but it is certainly not easy. If
better ways of working were known and proven, clinicians would be using them
already.
Many Questions
This book is about a particular kind of innovation that is needed in healthcare, the
transformation from healthcare as the work of individuals, to healthcare as the
work of teams. Healthcare has grown beyond the capabilities of any one individual,
yet is still organized, taught and practised from deep cultures of autonomous
individual effort.
Pioneering practitioners working to create teamwork in healthcare, and
pioneering researchers working to understand and measure teamwork, learn
quickly that there are many unanswered questions: What will optimum teamwork
look like in healthcare? How should it be measured? How can it be achieved? How
can it be sustained?
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439
Understanding Teamwork
One way of understanding what optimum teamwork will look like in healthcare
is to ask what happens already on our ‘great days’. In any of the settings where
I work, great days for me happen when I have the good fortune of working with
others that I know and trust. Even when an operation is difcult or a patient
very sick, everything is easier on great days. Things ow more smoothly, people
intuitively understand and anticipate each other’s needs, tensions are lower and
there is a lot of mutual support.
There is a personal dimension as well on great days: it is satisfying to be part of
a team like that, feeling that your contributions are part of something greater than
yourself, with meaning and purpose. In my experience, great teamwork feels very
‘alive’. By ‘alive’ I mean a satisfying kind of mutual engagement and intrinsic
energy that feels different than ‘just working’. Great teamwork should look and
feel like great days, every day.

Measuring Teamwork
Based on the ‘great days’ approach, teamwork should be measured by variables that
reect the following characteristics: knowledge of one another, trust, ow, intuitive
understanding, anticipation, lowered tension, mutual support, satisfaction, mutual
engagement, meaning and purpose. If we could somehow measure ‘aliveness’ I
would add that, too.
It is interesting that present measures of teamwork are frequently based
on observations of individual behaviour. Measuring teamwork by observing
individual behaviour, and focusing on individual behaviour for teamwork training
and professional evaluation, may miss the essential point of teamwork which is that
teamwork is about the team, not the individual. In the same way that practitioners
may have difculty moving beyond deep cultures of individual accountability in
which they are trained to think and work effectively in teams, researchers trained
in observing and analysing the behaviour of individuals may be challenged to
break free of their training to approach the study of teamwork at the level of the
team as a whole using analytical models.
Most of the papers in this book are about operating room (OR) teamwork. As a
cardiac surgeon, the OR is an important part of my professional life. But I also care
for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), on the post-operative oor, and before
and after their hospitalization. Each of these settings presents different challenges
regarding teamwork.
In the OR, a small group of people work together in close physical proximity
with a high level of intensity and focus for the duration of a several-hour operation.
In the ICU, a critical-care nurse is consistently present with the patient and a
respiratory therapist is close by, but other members of the care team usually do not
work in consistent physical proximity except during times of crisis. Care in the
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440
ICU requires a different kind of teamwork than the OR – coordinating information
and care activities across roles and disciplines, across space and time, and among

different individuals as shifts, schedules and assignments change. On the post-
operative oor and in outpatient settings the challenge of coordinating care across
roles, disciplines, people, space and time is different still. In each case the needs
for teamwork are different, and the resources available for achieving teamwork
are different.
These realities point to the need for new research approaches that consider teams
inclusively with their contexts. I believe that socio-technical research approaches
based on concepts of distributed cognition, situated learning and activity theory
will become increasingly important for understanding healthcare teamwork and
implementing teamwork across various clinical environments.
It is also possible that present methods of observing and analysing teamwork
by observers trained in a particular discipline such as human factors science may
give way to new methods and new insights that are likely to be achieved through
the interactions of an interdisciplinary research approach. Innovation almost
always arises at the edges and intersections of disciplines, rarely within the core
of a discipline.
I was part of an interdisciplinary research team that analysed clinical teamwork
from the intersecting perspectives of the assembled team members: a cognitive
engineer, organizational psychologist, human factors scientist, anthropologist,
computer scientist, communications analyst, knowledge management expert,
patient advocate and surgeon. It was an extraordinary experience, as thought
provoking and transformational for the research team as collaborative practice
was for the clinical teams we studied.
A communications teacher once told me that, to be effective, the structure of a
change message must match the desired nal result. In other words, if the desired
nal result is teamwork, then the structure of the change message (the research
that we do) must demonstrate teamwork as well. I believe that we are only just
beginning to understand healthcare teamwork, and how to research it. Advances
in teamwork research will proceed hand-in-hand with advances in healthcare
teamwork itself.

Implementing Teamwork
If the ‘great days’ approach is right, teamwork in healthcare means ‘working with
others that I know and trust’. If so, teamwork is achieved by actions that help
teams develop mutual knowledge and trust.
I am increasingly convinced that care teams develop mutual knowledge and
trust more reliably through social interventions at the level of the team as a whole
than by cognitive or behavioural interventions directed at individual team members.
Exceptional teamwork arises when organizational structures and activities exist or
are created in the local team environment that provide opportunities for mutual
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441
reection and dialogue among team members. In my experience teams achieve
exceptional teamwork by creating structures that promote interactions and
establishing activities that improve relationships.
The key insight for implementing teamwork is that mutual knowledge and trust
– which I believe are foundational for teamwork – are team-level resources that
arise and are continually renewed over time through interactions, conversations
and other relationally based experiences among team members. These and other
team-level resources such as team-level ability to change and adapt are more or less
likely to arise depending upon the presence or absence of supportive structural and
social preconditions in the local environment. From this perspective, teamwork is
socially constructed and always changing.
When we rst developed our collaborative care model and received the
Eisenberg Award, a number of other teams contacted us to learn from us and
replicate our methods. At that time we believed our teamwork success was due
to specic things we did during our collaborative rounds process based on crew
resource management principles. When other teams replicated these methods they
often did not achieve our results. Over time we realized that our success was the
result of many small changes we had made in our team structures and routines,
especially the weekly team meetings, that helped us get to know one another,

understand each other’s roles, motivations and contributions, and develop trust.
Specic behaviours were much less important than structural changes that led to
better relationships.
Sustaining Teamwork
One of the most interesting unsolved challenges regarding healthcare teamwork
is how it can be sustained. This is a question of culture and how cultures change.
It is important for clinicians and researchers to consider teamwork and safety
with respectful awareness of the complex and powerful forces that surround
clinical healthcare education and practice. Aviation reached a tipping point and
successfully achieved a sustainable culture of safety, but that is a 40-year story
still in evolution.
I have watched with excitement then sadness as healthcare teams train
together in simulations or successfully implement teamwork in their own clinical
environments, then slip inexorably back to their previous status quo in the face of
overwhelming cultural and contextual forces. Most of the clinical teams I have
helped or observed have been successful at rst at achieving degrees of teamwork,
but then gradually or suddenly lost ground later. That is the heartbreak of this
otherwise joyous work.
I do not yet know how to sustain teamwork. I understand what great teamwork
is like and have experienced it rst hand. I know teamwork when I see it, and
believe measurement is increasingly possible. I am learning how to implement
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442
teamwork and can do that reliably. But I do not know yet how to sustain teamwork.
This is the state of our art: we can bring teams to life, but they do not live long.
I think the key to sustainability has to do with the nature of the connections
between the local team environment and its larger organizational context. Whereas
implementing teamwork depends on structures and social preconditions at the local
team level, sustaining teamwork depends on the nature of the context in which the
local environment exists and how it connects to the larger organization.

In my experience, creating exceptional teamwork more often than not
induces an ‘organizational immune response’ against the transformed local team
environment, as the local unit begins to function and relate within the larger
organization in unfamiliar ways. The local unit is perceived as overly autonomous
and out of control. High reliability teamwork may not appear to be reliable at all
from a traditional hierarchical management viewpoint. In fact, it can be downright
irritating.
Creating exceptional front-line teamwork disturbs the connections between
the local unit and the larger organization. It affects management methods and
organizational functions throughout the entire organization, far removed from the
front-line team environment. It is important to recognize that teamwork threatens
traditional methods of organizational operation and management. Understanding,
measuring, implementing and sustaining teamwork require research and insights
at all these levels.
Looking Forward
In a few years it will be clear which of the ideas and approaches described in this
book will have withstood tests of time and usefulness. A direction that I believe will
not withstand the test of time is a tendency to approach diagnosis and treatment as
a commodity and healthcare as a transaction. I believe something very important
is lost by this approach. Teamwork and safety science can be used to support a
commodity approach to healthcare, but I hope they will not be used that way. One
of the most powerful ways to avoid this mistake is to include the patient in our
conceptualization of the team.
The most important lesson I have learned caring for patients and studying
teamwork in healthcare is that healthcare comes rst from the human spirit. We
need to understand, measure and implement this aspect of teamwork, which I
believe is the relational dimension. If we do this, I am convinced that what we
achieve will stand the test of time. Think about how a single smile can brighten
your day, and a single bad interaction can close the world down around you.
Healthcare and teamwork are built from these moments of human connection. The

essential nature of healthcare – and teamwork – is relational.
It was a pleasure being present in Edinburgh to hear these presentations rst
hand. It is a privilege being asked to contribute to this book. A learning community
is being established through these activities, and I am excited to be part of it. A
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443
growing network of practitioners and researchers is making contributions that will
change how healthcare is thought about and practised for years to come.
I am reminded of one of our former surgery residents, Prakash Pendali, at the
University of Cincinnati. Something Prakash said frequently may be an appropriate
nal comment for this chapter. Whenever anyone asked Prakash how he was doing
he always gave the same answer. He would smile and say:
Living the dream, sir!
References
The Joint Commission (2008) John M Eisenberg award for Patient Safety. Available
at < [last
accessed November 2008].