Background: Pediatric trauma care requires complex coordination and rapid, accurate actions in high-stakes situations by ad hoc interprofessional teams. This teamwork is driven by human interactions and institutional culture, which are difficult constructs to measure. Simulated pediatric traumas offer opportunities to observe team communication practices, understand the landscape of team communications, and explore impacts to simulated patient endpoints.
Methods: We used an ethnographic approach to conduct a qualitative study of interprofessional team communications. We observed 12 pediatric trauma activations in a simulated environment and used observational field notes, structured debriefings, participant focus groups and semistructured interviews as data sources to allow us to identify and categorize patterns of interprofessional team communications. We used recursive thematic analysis to analyze this qualitative data by transformation of qualitative findings into frequency counts of effective and ineffective examples of team communications across the 12 sessions.
Results: Three primary themes were identified. Each theme was further defined by 10 subthemes demonstrating observed communication patterns. All identified themes represented approaches to communications or their mechanisms that may have enabled success or presented obstacles to working effectively as a team. The 3 primary themes were observed in all scenarios.
Conclusion: Results from this ethnography provide the background context to inform systematic assessment of communication practices and drive future translational simulation studies toward impacting interprofessional team communications on patient care. Findings carry implications for linking communications of ad hoc teams to existing workflows, training practices, and psychological safety.
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