Preliminary Adaptation, Development, and Testing of a Team Sports Model to Improve Briefing and Debriefing in Neonatal Resuscitation

Briefing in team sports has been shown to benefit both performance and confidence among team members. The neonatal resuscitation team shares similarities with sports teams, where task performance includes rapid decision-making skills within dynamic situations, alongside unpredictable circumstances. AIM: We aimed to determine the effect of a team sports briefing model on the neonatal resuscitation team. Method: We adapted and redesigned a team sports briefing and debriefing model and related protocol and tested them with a neonatal resuscitation team in a U.K. university teaching hospital. RESULTS: The team’s confidence and perceptions around these 2 aspects of resuscitation were studied along with frequency of task execution before and after a teaching intervention about the sports teams' approach to briefing and the introduction of a 7-point checklist. In 20 preintervention observations of 13 key tasks, areas for improvement in how neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) staff prepared for deliveries and potential resuscitations were found such as in “discussing potential deliveries that day” (n = 10, 50%), “identifying roles within the resus team that shift” (n = 5, 20%), and announcing when and where a debrief would occur (n = 0, 0%). Postintervention, the NICU team’s mean task completion increased significantly from 9.23 (SD = 6.34) to 18.0 (SD = 1.83), a statistically meaningful difference of 8.77 (95% CI, 4.99−12.55; P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Together with increased levels of confidence and efficiency reported postintervention, this provides some evidence that a brief–debrief process based on how sports team’s approach pregame situations could be potentially transferable and beneficial to NICU team performance.