Importance of High-Performing Teams in the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit

The importance of teamwork in health care delivery and patient safety is increasingly being recognized and has benefitted substantially by adopting a human factors’ perspective and approach. The scientific field of human factors can be defined in many ways, but the commonality across definitions and applications is the focus on those components within an interactive system related to human functionality and fallibility. By recognizing human-centric and human-driven strengths and flaws in a complex system, we may be able to better understand their root causes to maintain performance-enhancing behaviors and improve or support error-generating behaviors. As systems increase in complexity, consequences of suboptimal performance become more severe, demands become excessive and time-sensitive, and human lives are at stake, relying on teams represents a natural solution to enhance perspective, decision-making, and global knowledge beyond the individual level.

In surgery, recent initiatives have been adopted in the United States and worldwide, aiming to train surgical providers, from novices to senior levels, on important nontechnical skills, such as situational awareness, leadership, decision-making, communication, and teamwork. In fact, in 2016, the American College of Surgeons adopted and recommended nontechnical skills training beginning during undergraduate medical education and continuing through surgical residency and postgraduate training as a requirement of ongoing Maintenance of Certification. Furthermore, the Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons framework has implemented and validated to the US surgical context as a team-training platform.