SNF-Professorship

Recent research shows that the challenges to patient safety are mostly organizational not just clinical. Based on systematic incident analyses in healthcare, teamwork has been identified as a key area of patient safety interventions with human factors research - such as the research program of the SNSF funded professorship “Teamwork in acute patient care: How team processes and clinicians’ perceptions of teamwork affect patient safety” - being integral to achieving this goal. 

Research in high-risk industries such as aviation shows that a performance critical feature of effective teamwork is coordination and that high performing teams adapt their coordination patterns to changing task requirements (e.g. in case of emergencies). In order to improve the teamwork of the overall operating room team, measures to assess adaptive coordination in anesthesia and surgical crews need to be developed and then used in concert for future research and training development.

The first two projects of this research program aim at identifying coordination processes that support high clinical performance. Both projects will help to identify performance critical aspects of coordination and feed into in medical education and training.

• Effective coordination in acute patient care: The influence of task and team characteristics
• Adaptive coordination in surgical crews 

The third project focuses on aspects of organizational climate such as clinicians' perceptions of teamwork that form the foundation on which team processes are enacted. The results of this project will feed into practical recommendations for management approaches that consider staff well-being and patient safety as synergistic outcomes

• Interrelations of clinicians’ perceptions of teamwork with clinician well-being and patient safety

Other Research Projects of the IPHF Group 

• Communicating with non-speaking critical care patients: current practices in Swiss intensive care units
  (together with Patrk Vanek, Cantonal Hospital Chur and Paola Massaroto, Ospedale Regionale di Lugano)
• Adaptation and pilot testing of the "Safety Management Audit for Hospitals (SMAHO)" for the use in German anaesthesia departments
  (German Anaesthesia Association)

Research Projects in Collaboration with other Universities

• Characteristics of Clinical Risk Management in Mental Health
  (Stiftung Suzanne und Hans Biäsch zur Förderung der Angewandten Psychologie, together with Matthias Briner, Center for Organizational and Occupational Sciences, ETH Zurich) 
• Influence of patient handoff structure and completeness on the quality of subsequent patient treatment
  (Internal funds of the University Hospital Basel and ETH Zurich, together with Simon Foster, Center for Organizational and Occupational Sciences, ETH Zurich, and Dr. Stefan Gisin & Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ummenhofer, University Hospital Basel)
• Shift handover practices of emergency physicians and nurses
  (Research collaboration with Dr. Monika Brodmann, University Hospital Bern)