Organizing for teamwork in healthcare: an alternative to team training?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how organizational design could support teamwork and to identify organizational design principles that promote successful teamwork. Design/methodology/approach Since traditional team training sessions take resources away from production, the alternative approach pursued here explores the promotion of teamwork by means of organizational design. A wide and pragmatic definition of teamwork is applied: a team is considered to be a group of people that are set to work together on a task, and teamwork is then what they do in relation to their task.

Compliance with the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist: deviations and possible improvements.

Background: Previous research suggests that the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist time-out reduces communication failures and medical complications and supports development of better safety attitudes. Previous research also indicates that different values can affect the implementation of interventions.

Objective: To investigate the actual usage of the checklist in practice and to catalogue deviations for the purpose of identifying improvements.

Social structures in the operating theatre: how contradicting rationalities and trust affect work.

Aim: This article is a report of a study of how healthcare professionals involved in surgery orientate themselves to their common task, and how this orientation can be affected by the social and organizational context.

Background: Previous research indicates that surgical teams are not as cohesive as could be expected and that communication failures frequently occur. However, little is known about how these problems are related to their social, cultural and organizational context.

Computer supported visualisation of quality systems developed by network teams.

This paper reports a pilot study and three case studies to examine aimed at studying if a quality system, according to the ISO 9000 quality standard, can be visualised, exploring how the visualisation should be designed in order to support continuous improvements and evaluating the design process for development of prototypes. By discussing with the research team, three companies in southern Sweden set up design teams to establish principles for visualisations of their quality systems on their intranets. Together with one of the researchers, the design teams created and evaluated computer supported prototypes and exchanged ideas between the teams via the Internet.