Factors influencing team behaviors in surgery: A qualitative study to inform teamwork interventions (July 2018)

Summary

Surgical excellence demands teamwork. Poor team behaviours negatively affect team performance and are associated with adverse events and worse outcomes. Interventions to improve surgical teamwork focusing on frontline team members’ nontechnical skills have proliferated but shown mixed results. Literature on teamwork in organisations suggests that team behaviours are also contingent on psychosocial, cultural, and organisational factors. This study examined factors influencing surgical team behaviors to inform more contextually sensitive and effective approaches to optimising surgical teamwork.