Safer Surgery part 47 potx

Pioneering practitioners working to create teamwork in healthcare, and pioneering researchers working to understand and measure teamwork, learn quickly that there are many unanswered que

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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 difficult 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 benefits 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 influence 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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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 fixing the underlying dysfunctional cultural of healthcare and finding

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: <http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/

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 first day that Jeff Brown accompanied our care team as we made rounds in the ICU and on the post-operative floor 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 reflecting 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, efficiency, 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 reflect 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 insufficient 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 sufficient 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 finding ways to work and relate differently It is

important to realize that ‘modern scientific 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 definition 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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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 difficult or a patient very sick, everything is easier on great days Things flow 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 reflect the following characteristics: knowledge of one another, trust, flow, 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 difficulty 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 floor, 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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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 floor 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 final result In other words, if the desired final 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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reflection 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 first 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 specific 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 Specific 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 first 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 first hand I know teamwork when I see it, and believe measurement is increasingly possible I am learning how to implement

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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 first 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 first 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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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 final 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 <http://www.jointcommission.org/PatientSafety/EisenbergAward/> [last accessed November 2008]