NSF Award
0915899
The staff in trauma centers are faced with complex problems under time pressure.<br/>Despite the introduction of standard protocols, the diversity of injuries that can occur<br/>requires a coordinated approach to the evaluation and treatment for each patient.<br/>Trauma care involves complex teamwork under time pressure, and teamwork errors<br/>endanger patient care and increase costs. Our proposed ethnographic study will use<br/>observation and detailed analysis of video recordings of trauma resuscitations to<br/>determine the nature and extent of teamwork errors in a trauma center. This detailed<br/>study of complex teamwork will uncover the causes of teamwork errors in collaborative<br/>high-risk environments. Methods will be developed to understand how teams work and<br/>where difficulties arise. This work will yield detailed descriptions of errors and their<br/>causes, a taxonomy of teamwork errors, information on how to improve team<br/>performance, and guides to the use of technology for teamwork support. It extends the<br/>level of detail of ethnographic research so that we can achieve precision in the<br/>understanding of procedures which are difficult to monitor automatically but where<br/>step-by-step records are essential to detect the causes of errors.<br/>Understanding and improving the effectiveness of trauma teams has direct benefit to<br/>society. Further, complex collaborations are ubiquitous in modern enterprises and these<br/>results could improve collaborations both in terms of quality and productivity across<br/>organizations. In addition, this work will serve to develop the skills needed by a new<br/>cadre of researchers with knowledge of computer-supported collaborative work,<br/>video-content analysis and cooperative research.
