Basically, what ends up happening is at the beginning of a day, I choose a theater
to observe, and I spend the entire day in that theater observing between three and
eight surgical procedures.
Then what ends up happening is throughout the course of the day,
I take structured notes on who's talking to who.
What are they saying?
Is there a communication failure?
And if there is a failure, what is the observable consequence of it?
Then what I do at the very end of the day, when everybody's wrapping up,
is I chase them down to ask them to do a really short questionnaire.
Somewhere between five and ten minutes that tries to assess
the extent to which they think that there was good communication, teamwork, and
how they think they performed technically.
What I've ended up doing in the end is that I've collected about 206 surgical
episodes, taking notes.
I collected over 210 surveys, representing about 64 different surgical teams.
All of that, in addition to the over 2,000 pages of handwritten notes that I've
taken in theater, in addition to the hospital records that I've received.
So to say the least, there's a lot of data involved.
>> Yeah. I know,
Joseph, this project is still ongoing but do you have some data or
findings you can share with us?
Absolutely, we have some preliminary finding from our first study that we did.
Basically, let's think back to that scenario that I presented at the very
beginning, with those two surgeons.
The first surgeon is the technical master but interpersonally a monster.
The second surgeon, not the best necessarily,
average skills but is a really strong communicator.
Our results, thus far, suggest that actually you're better off choosing
the second surgeon as that surgeon is less likely to encounter a near miss.
A near miss is when something almost goes wrong but doesn't
either because somebody said something and interjects or just out of sheer luck.
The real kicker, though, is the fact that we know that a near miss oftentimes turns
into either a minor or a major complication.
That's when something actually does go wrong.