SURGEONS are people, and people are animals, and animals often fight. Which is why Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading experts on animal behaviour, has turned his attention to the operating theatre to demonstrate how insights drawn from his discipline might improve surgical practice. Dr de Waal—and, more particularly, Laura Jones, his colleague at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who did the actual field work—used the methods he honed studying chimpanzees to construct an ethogram of surgical teams. An ethogram is a list of all the types of behaviour that occur in a group of animals. The researchers created this by observing social interactions between 400 doctors, nurses and technicians during 200 operations covering eight specialisms. They logged all the non-technical communications they spotted, and classified them as “co-operative” (likely to lead to better surgical outcomes), “conflictive” (potentially jeopardising patient safety) or neutral.
As they describe...Continue reading
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