Zhike Lei Publishes Article in Leading Medical Education Journal on Team Reflection

Zhike Lei, PhD, associate professor of applied behavioral science, director, center for applied research published an article in leading medical education journal Academic Medicine on in-action team reflection. The article, “Reflection on the Fly: Development of the Team Reflection Behavioral Observation (TuRBO) System for Acute Care Teams”, shows professional teams in acute care settings such as emergency medicine, intensive care, or trauma surgery deal with rapidly evolving situations. Yet teamwork often breaks down and negatively affects patient safety and learning under time pressure. A team process that helps teams process information and adapt is in-action team reflection (TR). However, health care lacks a means for systematically observing and ultimately training in-action TR in acute care teams. To bridge this gap, Zhike Lei and her co-authors developed a theoretically and empirically informed framework, Team Reflection Behavioral Observation (TuRBO), for measuring in-action TR. They conducted exploratory reviews of the video recordings of 23 acute care teams training simulated emergencies and validated the TuRBO framework. 

The research findings reveal that reflective teams regularly step back, question the course of action, explore alternatives, and explicitly use all knowledge present in the team to plan next steps. These in-action TR behaviors promote team inclusiveness by flattening hierarchies in health care. This means that every team member is a valuable resource and complex patient care requires that we make use of this untapped potential.

The full article is available on Academic Medicine here.