Abstract
In healthcare, the team of medical providers must cooperatively seek the information and physical resources needed in order to be able to attend to patients in a timely and effective manner. Foraging theory is one field that may help describe the strategies used to acquire resources; however, the concept and definitions of foraging must be expanded to appropriately describe the team coordination activities in a high-risk, time-limited, event-driven environment. The issues of resource handoffs and the coordination of multiple task demands with shifts between tasks become crucial to the overall performance of the healthcare delivery system. Task interleaving and parallel work load issues are being investigated to distinguish these actions from the issue of workload interruptions emphasized in previous research.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.