Making surgery as safe as it should be: A qualitative study (October 2023)

Summary

Nontechnical skills (NTS) are the behaviours and thought processes used by surgeons to make decisions, maintain awareness of the operating environment, communicate with and lead team members with the view to producing reliably safe outcomes. This qualitative research explored how surgeons deploy NTS to facilitate safe and effective outcomes from surgical interventions.

The authors conclude that successfully understanding and engaging NTS is potentially more proactively useful to surgeons than feedback from more invasive techniques used by some approaches to safe operator assurance.