A new study in America has recently suggested that if operating room staff adopted team building procedures from airline crews then surgical death rates might be reduced.
A team building event that trained operating room staff to freely talk about the potential challenges before surgeries, using checklists and then to review the procedure afterwards is thought to have massively lowered the surgical death rate at participating hospitals.
Throughout the one year study, surgical deaths fell by 18% in participating hospitals, compared to 7% at hospitals that had not yet completed the training.
The importance of dynamic communication and effective teamwork has been emphasised through this study and it encourages all medical staffs to review and challenge each other openly and without fear. With the use of checklists, discussions are encouraged and guided and team work is improved greatly with pre-operative briefings and post-operative debriefings.
At the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dr Peter Provonost (a professor of anaesthesiology and critical care medicine) wrote an accompanying editorial to the study's findings. He stated that the study provides strong evidence that teaching operating room staff about teamwork and effective communication can reduce deaths among surgical patients.
He also stated that for so long now, medicine has emphasized technical work over team work. That within medicine we focus on putting tubes in the right places and tying knots so that the wounds do not fall apart.
In Medicine Dr Peter Provonost stated also stated we needed to emphasize the technical but that teamwork skills have been greatly under-estimated, that poor communication leads to a significant amount of preventable harm and that this study provides a practical way to address some of the teamwork challenges using team building workshops.
Sara Wright is working within marketing and is currently researching team building
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