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Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects

The resilience of a healthcare system hinges on the adaptability of its teams. Thus far, healthcare teams have relied on well-defined scopes of practice to fulfill their safety mandate. While this feature has proven effective when dealing with stable situations, when it comes to disruptive events, h...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Cristancho, Sayra, Thompson, Graham
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Ubiquity Press 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10312249/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37397182
http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pme.1051
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author Cristancho, Sayra
Thompson, Graham
author_facet Cristancho, Sayra
Thompson, Graham
author_sort Cristancho, Sayra
collection PubMed
description The resilience of a healthcare system hinges on the adaptability of its teams. Thus far, healthcare teams have relied on well-defined scopes of practice to fulfill their safety mandate. While this feature has proven effective when dealing with stable situations, when it comes to disruptive events, healthcare teams find themselves navigating a fine balance between safety and resilience. Therefore, a better understanding of how the safety vs resilience trade-off varies under different circumstances is necessary if we are to promote and better train for resilience in modern healthcare teams. In this paper, we aim to bring awareness to the sociobiology analogy that healthcare teams might find useful during moments when safety and adaptability have the potential to conflict. Three principles underpin the sociobiology analogy: communication, decentralization, and plasticity. Of particular interest in this paper is plasticity whereby swapping roles or tasks becomes an adaptive, rather than a maladaptive, response teams could embrace when facing disruptive situations. While plasticity has naturally evolved in social insects, infusing plasticity in healthcare teams requires intentional training. Inspired by the sociobiology analogy, such training must value the ability: a) to read each other’s cues and miscues, b) to step aside when others had the necessary skills, even if outside their scope, c) to deviate from protocols, and d) to foster cross-training. If the goal is to increase a team’s behavioural flexibility and boost their resilience, this training mindset should become second nature.
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spelling pubmed-103122492023-07-01 Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects Cristancho, Sayra Thompson, Graham Perspect Med Educ Eye Opener The resilience of a healthcare system hinges on the adaptability of its teams. Thus far, healthcare teams have relied on well-defined scopes of practice to fulfill their safety mandate. While this feature has proven effective when dealing with stable situations, when it comes to disruptive events, healthcare teams find themselves navigating a fine balance between safety and resilience. Therefore, a better understanding of how the safety vs resilience trade-off varies under different circumstances is necessary if we are to promote and better train for resilience in modern healthcare teams. In this paper, we aim to bring awareness to the sociobiology analogy that healthcare teams might find useful during moments when safety and adaptability have the potential to conflict. Three principles underpin the sociobiology analogy: communication, decentralization, and plasticity. Of particular interest in this paper is plasticity whereby swapping roles or tasks becomes an adaptive, rather than a maladaptive, response teams could embrace when facing disruptive situations. While plasticity has naturally evolved in social insects, infusing plasticity in healthcare teams requires intentional training. Inspired by the sociobiology analogy, such training must value the ability: a) to read each other’s cues and miscues, b) to step aside when others had the necessary skills, even if outside their scope, c) to deviate from protocols, and d) to foster cross-training. If the goal is to increase a team’s behavioural flexibility and boost their resilience, this training mindset should become second nature. Ubiquity Press 2023-06-26 /pmc/articles/PMC10312249/ /pubmed/37397182 http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pme.1051 Text en Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Eye Opener
Cristancho, Sayra
Thompson, Graham
Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects
title Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects
title_full Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects
title_fullStr Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects
title_full_unstemmed Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects
title_short Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects
title_sort building resilient healthcare teams: insights from analogy to the social biology of ants, honey bees and other social insects
topic Eye Opener
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10312249/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37397182
http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pme.1051
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