During this podcast, Walter interviews Jan Schmutz, PhD, a team psychologist and researcher from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. They discuss their recent paper in Academic Medicine 1 , in which they present a novel conceptual framework for team reflexivity in healthcare, and how it can impact both patient care and learning.
Team reflexivity refers to how teams reflect together about goals, processes, and strategies to improve current and future performance. While team reflection after an event–i.e. debriefing–will be well-known to listeners, Jan and Walter discuss opportunities for team reflexivity both BEFORE and DURING patient care events, especially those that are highly dynamic and evolve rapidly. Examples would be a team huddle before a major trauma patient arrives in the ED or performing a quick recap and/or evaluation of ongoing patient care to make sure the team is on the same page and not missing anything important. Jan and Walter highlight how opportunities for team reflexivity can form the basis of ‘what to debrief’ to help teams improve in subsequent events.