Nontechnical Skills for Intraoperative Team Members.

Nontechnical skills, defined as the set of cognitive and social skills used by individuals and teams to reduce error and improve performance in complex systems, have become increasingly recognized as a key contributor to patient safety. Efforts to characterize, quantify, and teach nontechnical skills in the context of perioperative care continue to evolve. This review article summarizes the essential behaviors for safety, described in taxonomies for nontechnical skills assessments developed for intraoperative clinical team members (eg, surgeons, anesthesiologists, scrub practitioners, perfusionists).

Formalizing the Hidden Curriculum of Performance Enhancing Errors.

Despite its inevitability, error remains an uncomfortable topic for discussion amongst surgeons. There are a range of reasons cited for this; significantly, there is an inextricable link between a surgeon's actions and their patient's outcomes. Attempts to reflect on error are often unstructured and without a defined end point, and modern surgical curricula lack content to guide residents' learning on recognizing and reflecting on sentinel events.