Safer Surgery

Rhona Flin (BSc, PhD Psychology) is Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Aberdeen. She is a Chartered Psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She directs a team of psychologists working with high-risk industries on research and consultancy projects concerned with the management of safety and emergency response. She is currently leading the Scottish Patient Safety Research Network and has been working with anaesthetists and surgeons since 1999. Her books include Sitting in the Hot Seat: Leaders and Teams for Critical Incident Management (Wiley, 1996), Managing the Offshore Installation Workforce (edited with Slaven, PennWell Books, 1996), Decision Making Under Stress (edited with Salas, Strub & Martin, Ashgate, 1997), Incident Command: Tales from the Hot Seat (edited with Arbuthnot, Ashgate 2002) and Safety at the Sharp End: A Guide to Non-Technical Skills (with O'Connor & Crichton, Ashgate, 2008). Lucy Mitchell (MA, MRes Psychology) is a Research Assistant at the Industrial Psychology Research Centre at the University of Aberdeen. She is currently developing a framework for assessing and training operating theatre scrub practitioners' non-technical skills and is also working towards a PhD in this area. She is a former police officer and has previously investigated the decision-making skills of police firearms officers.

Contents: Foreword, Charles Vincent; Preface, George Youngson; Introduction, Rhona Flin and Lucy Mitchell; Part I Tools for Measuring Behaviour in the Operating Theatre: Development and evaluation of the NOTSS behaviour rating system for intraoperative surgery (2003-2008), Steven Yule, Rhona Flin, Nikki Maran, David Rowley, George Youngson, John Duncan and Simon Paterson-Brown; Competence evaluation in orthopaedics - a 'bottom up' approach, David Pitts and David Rowley; Implementing the assessment of surgical skills and non-technical behaviours in the operating room, Joy Marriott, Helen Purdie, Jim Crossley and Jonathan Beard; Scrub practitioners' list of intra-operative non-technicalskills - SPLINTS, Lucy Mitchell and Rhona Flin; Observing and assessing surgical teams: the Observational Teamwork Assessment for Surgery (OTAS), Shabnam Undre, Nick Sevdalis and Charles Vincent; Rating operating theatre teams - surgical NOTECHS, Ami Mishra, Ken Catchpole, Guy Hirst, Trevor Dale and Peter McCulloch; RATE: a customizable, portable hardware/software system for analyzing and teaching human performance in the operating room, Stephanie Guerlain and J. Forrest Calland; A-TEAM: targets for training, feedback and assessment of all OR members' teamwork, Carl-Johan Wallin, Leif Hedman, Lisbet Meurling and Li FellAnder-Tsai; Introducing TOPplus in the operating theatre, Connie Dekker-van Doorn, Linda Wauben, Benno Bonke, Geert Kazemier, Jan Klein, Bianca Balvert, Bart Vrouenraets, Robbert Huijsman and Johan Lange. Part II Observational Studies of Anaesthetists: Integrating non-technical skills into anaesthetists' workplace-based assessment tools, Ronnie Glavin and Rona Patey; Using ANTS for workplace assessment, Jodi Graham, Emma Giles and Graham Hocking; Measuring coordination behaviour in anaesthesia teams during induction of general anaesthetics, Michaela Kolbe, Barbara KA nzle, EnikA Zala-MezA , Johannes Wacker and Gudela Grote; Identifying characteristics of effective tea