Abstract
Surgery depends on inter-professional teamwork, which is becoming increasingly specialized. If surgery is to become a highly reliable system, it must adapt and professionals must learn from, and share, tested models of inter-professional teamwork. Trainers also need valid measures of teamwork to assess individual and team performance. However, measurement and assessment of inter-professional teamwork is lacking and inter-professional team training is scarce in the surgical domain. The presentation will address the complexity of measuring inter-professional teamwork in the operating theatre. It will focus mainly on the design and properties of observational assessment tools and will describe in some detail the “Observational Teamwork Assessment for Surgery” (OTAS) that our group has developed. We aim to inform the researcher or clinician of the issues to consider when designing or choosing from alternative measures of team performance for training or assessment.
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