Non-technical skills performance in pre-hospital resuscitation
High acuity medical emergencies requiring time critical resuscitation team intervention are common and important. There is an increasing emphasis on the importance of nontechnical skills (NTS) for high acuity resuscitation teams although little direct evidence exists to demonstrate the relationship between NTS and the concurrent performance of technical skills (although this is often assumed). A corollary of this is the paucity of direct measurement of the impact of training interventions to enhance NTS on patient outcomes.
This work by Dr Alistair Dewar investigates the following:
Hypotheses
- The observed technical performance of emergency resuscitation teams is correlated with observed NTS performance of the team leader.
- Important aspects of team leader’s NTS performance can be reliably measured.
- NTS can be optimised by the targeted application of education and training interventions e.g. the ‘simulation and debrief’ methodology.
- Improving a team leader’s NTS will lead to improved technical performance of the team.
Aims of the project
- To audit the technical performance of resuscitation teams working in time critical emergency situations and dynamically changing environments.
- Audit the NTS (e.g. situational awareness, communication, decision making) of resuscitation teams as above.
- Investigate the association between behavioural markers of NTS performance and technical performance of resuscitation teams.
