Speaking Up Is Related to Better Team Performance in Simulated Anesthesia Inductions: An Observational Study

Thegoal in this study was to test the relationship between speaking up—i.e., questioning, correcting, or clarifying a current procedure—and technical team performance in anesthesia.
Hypothesis 1: team members’ higher levels of speaking up are related to higher levels of technical team performance.
Hypothesis 2: team members will react to speaking up by either clarifying their procedure or initiating a procedural change.
Hypothesis 3: higher levels of speaking up during an earlier phase of teamwork will be related to higher levels of speaking up during a later phase.
This report was previously presented, in part, at the fourth International Workshop: Behavioural Science Applied to Surgery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; sixth Annual SIOP Conference, Chicago, IL; and 10th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making, Orlando, FL. Parts of the raw data were also used for an analysis of interactions of team mental models and monitoring behaviors.

Link to "Anesthesia & Analgesia" journal