Biomedical subjects

Nick Sevdalis

Publications and source records attributed to Nick Sevdalis.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Teaching evidence-based decision-making.

Evidence-based decision-making is important in surgery, but the nature of the work makes it difficult. Teaching it requires an interactive approach with a clinical team willing to consider it seriously,and to derive practical solutions. Decision-making and its influences must be understood, so that surgeons have a realistic idea of the role of evidence. Cognitive factors are particularly important.Strategies developed in the context of this knowledge are more likely to be adopted and used. Experts must be involved in searching for evidence and members of the management team in the learning process, the former to provide expertise on searching,the latter to ensure that the reasons for proposed changes are understood and treated sympathetically by those with financial control.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

PubMed2006

The complexity of measuring interprofessional teamwork in the operating theatre.

Surgery depends on interprofessional teamwork, which is becoming increasingly specialized. If surgery is to become a highly reliable system, it must adapt and professionals must learn from, and share, tested models of interprofessional teamwork. Trainers also need valid measures of teamwork to assess individual and team performance. However, measurement and assessment of interprofessional teamwork is lacking and interprofessional team training is scarce in the surgical domain. This paper addresses the complexity of measuring interprofessional teamwork in the operating theatre. It focuses mainly on the design and properties of observational assessment tools. The report and analysis serves to inform the researcher or clinician of the issues to consider when designing or choosing from alternative measures of team performance for training or assessment.

Humans↗

PubMed2006

Teamwork in the operating theatre: cohesion or confusion?

RATIONALE: The aim of the research that we report here was to empirically assess the cohesiveness of the multidisciplinary operating theatre (OT) team. METHOD: We used concepts from the team performance and team mental models literature to assess OT professionals' perceptions of their teamwork, the structure of their teams and their respective roles within them and their teams' performance. RESULTS: Team structure: OT professionals would welcome a change from the current structure of the team, although there was no agreement on what that structure is. Nurses perceived the team as unitary, surgeons and anaesthetists perceived it as comprising multiple subteams. Team roles: OT professionals tended to overrate their own understanding of their colleagues' role in the OT relative to the role understanding that the colleagues attributed to them. This tendency was especially marked for the surgeons. Team communication and team performance: OT professionals agreed on the relative importance of the various communicating pairs in the OT. Moreover, they were satisfied with the quality of communication among them, except for the communication between the surgeon and the anaesthetist, which received lower ratings. Finally, the quality of the teamwork in the OT was deemed acceptable, although there is room for improvement. CONCLUSIONS: The OT environment need not be as cohesive as previously assumed--a finding that carries implications for the effectiveness of team training interventions. Further research is needed in order to fully comprehend the dynamics of the OT as a working environment and, most importantly, their relation to patient safety.

Communication↗

PubMed2006

Predicting preferences: a neglected aspect of shared decision-making.

In recent years, shared decision-making between patients and doctors regarding choice of treatment has become an issue of priority. Although patients' preferences lie at the core of the literature on shared decision-making, there has not been any attempt so far to link the concept of shared decision-making with the extensive behavioural literature on people's self-predictions of their future preferences. The aim of the present review is to provide this link. First, we summarize behavioural research that suggests that people mispredict their future preferences and feelings. Secondly, we provide the main psychological accounts for people's mispredictions. Thirdly, we suggest three main empirical questions for inclusion in a programme aimed at enriching our understanding of shared decision-making and improving the procedures used for putting it into practice.

Decision Making↗

PubMed2005

The differential effect of realistic and unrealistic counterfactual thinking on regret.

Research has established that realistic counterfactual thinking can determine the intensity and the content of people's affective reactions to decision outcomes and events. Not much is known, however, about the affective consequences of counterfactual thinking that is unrealistic (i.e., that does not correspond to the main causes of a negative outcome). In three experiments, we investigate the influence of realistic and unrealistic counterfactuals on experienced regret after negative outcomes. In Experiment 1, we found that participants who thought unrealistically about a poor outcome reported less regret than those who thought realistically about it. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we replicated this finding and we showed that the decrease in regret was associated with a shift in the causal attributions of the poor outcome. Participants who thought unrealistically attributed it more to external circumstances and less to their own behaviours than those who thought realistically about it. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role of counterfactuals as self-serving biases and the functionality of regret as a counterfactual emotion.

Adult↗