PROCEEDINGS of the HUMAN FACTORS AND ERGONOMICS SOCIETY 45th ANNUAL MEETING- 2001 PRACTICES OF HIGH RELIABILITY TEAMS: OBSERVATIONS IN TRAUMA RESUSCITATION

This paper reports findings on some of the practices adopted by teams based on interviews and observations of teams working in trauma resuscitation. This study was conducted at a level I trauma center over a period of six months. Although analysis of interview transcripts is on-going, these practices can be tentatively organized into several general themes: learning and trusting other roles, sharing responsibilities, ensuring team awareness, and being adaptive. In particular, even though membership of teams in trauma resuscitation is fluid and dynamic, by sharing the overall responsibilities for the well-being of the patiem, the teams are able to resist many failure factors. The demand for safe operation in high risk industries In this paper, we postulate a set of practices that has led researchers to study how to prevent accidents, teams in trauma resuscitation follow and that lead to why certain organizations have perceived good safety failure-resistant performance. In particular, we examine record, and what are the root causes of serious these practices against factors that seem to induce teams accidents. The high reliability organization theory (La to perform sub-optimally. In the setting where our Porte, 1996), for example, proposes a list of observations were made, the teams have fluid characteristics of high reliability organizations in terms membership; a primary mission of the teams is to train of internal processes of an organization, organization's some members while on the job; task load i