Team training

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: I read the article „The complexity of team training: what we have learned from aviation and its applications to medicine“ [1]. The author compares the necessity for collaboration in aviation with the necessity for collaboration during a surgery. Additionally, this papers gives an overview about important elements of team training.
This „finding of the week“ offers some thoughts about the need of collaboration in critical and daily-life situations.

The paper [1] analyzes the necessity for collaboration in aviation by looking at accidents happened in commercial aviation. In most cases the accidents were primarly caused by the flight crew itself due to the lack of good collaboration. Therefore, team training became a major goal in today’s commercial aviation. Cockpit resource management (crm) is „dealing with the interpersonal, team aspects of flying in a multipersonal crew“ [1].

According to Hamman [1], teamwork in health care is as important as it is in commercial aviation. In both situations, worst case scenarios can lead to a loss of life. Therefore, it is critical that everyone in a team is trained in collaborating with each other: Each member of a team has to know what the tasks of the other members are and what the other members need to know to fulfill their tasks. Even if a new information doesn’t apply to the own duties, for another team member this information might be critical.

In short, each member of a team has to know the duties of the others and to make good collaboration happen and to reduce the chance of issues caused by human factors.

This concept of team training doesn’t just apply to teams working in critical situations. The idea of crm can be applied to almost every situation in which teamwork occurs. The efficiency of collaboration can be increased, if every member is aware of the duties of their teammates. Furthermore, the need for non mandatory communication can be decreased as well. This allows the team to react in a more efficient way to new tasks or situations.

Finally, team training can develop one key concept of teamwork: the shared mental modell [2].

[1] Hamman, W. R. (2004): The complexity of team training: what we have learned from aviation and its applications to medicine, in: Quality and Safety in Health Care, 13 (Suppl. 1), pp. i72 – i79.

[2] Salas, Eduardo; Sims, Dana E.; Burke, C Shawn (2005): Is there a „Big Five“ in Teamwork?, in: Small Group Research, 36 (5), pp. 555 – 599.