Training Needs for Adaptive Coordination: Utilizing Task Analysis to Identify Coordination Requirements in Three Different Clinical Settings

Abstract

A team’s ability to coordinate and adapt their performance to meet situational demands is critical to excellent patient care. The goal of this article is to identify common coordination characteristics that enable health care action teams to ensure effective patient care and to discuss specific examples of adaptive coordination within the health care setting. Task analyses were conducted to identify situational demands, in three different clinical settings: cardiac anesthesia, pediatric sepsis simulation, and trauma resuscitation. Each task analysis identified specific coordination requirements for pertinent tasks. The research team compared these task analyses, identified emerging themes, and agreed on core coordination characteristics common across all three environments by consensus through iterative abductive analysis. Findings across these diverse clinical settings showed that expert action teams (a) continually appraise their dynamic environment, (b) identify and define points of coordination, and (c) respond to the demands of nonroutine events by making coordination highly explicit. Specific examples of adaptive coordination within the health care setting are discussed, and implications for training are articulated. Findings are also pertinent outside of health care and may contribute to the understanding of coordination behaviors within action teams across multiple settings.