Who's Who in the Trauma Bay? Association between Wearing of Identification Jackets and Trauma Teamwork Performance: A Simulation Study

INTRODUCTION: Trauma is the leading cause of under-45 mortality worldwide, and the leading cause of years of life lost. To manage the severe trauma patients, trauma teams require both improved technical and nontechnical skills, such as communication, leadership, teamwork, and team resource management. The objective of this study was to measure the impact of the identification of trauma team members on teamwork performance. The hypothesis was that wearing identification jackets was associated with better teamwork performance. METHODS: The study was conducted from 2015 to 2019 at the Percy Army Training Hospital, a trauma center in the Ile-de-France region. In 2016, the protocol for receiving severe trauma patients was modified, including the obligation to wear identification jackets. Thus, each member of the trauma team wore a jacket identifying his or her function. This study was carried out by analyzing videos of medical simulation sessions during the reception of trauma patients in the trauma bay. The study compared the teamwork performance before 2016, a period with no identification jackets wearing, with the teamwork performance after 2016, a period with identification jackets wearing. The Team Emergency Assessment Measure (TEAM)Scale was used. This TEAM scale is a benchmark measure of teamwork performance, particularly adapted to the context of trauma. RESULTS: A total of 48 participants were included in the study. Six videos of medical simulation sessions “arrival of severe trauma patients” were analyzed and divided into two groups. A first group of three videos with no identification jackets wearing was the GROUP ID(-). A second group of three videos with identification jackets wearing was the GROUP ID(+). An 11-item TEAM scale was used to rate each video for a total of 33 scores per group. The distribution of the median scores for the GROUP ID(+) was significantly different from the distribution of the median scores for the GROUP ID(-) (P = 0.001). These results were consistent with those of other single-center studies conducted in operating theaters and in emergency departments, where clearly identifying the roles of each member of the medical teams was associated with less communication errors. The main limits of this study were its single-center nature and a limited data sample. CONCLUSION: In this single-center simulation study, wearing identification jackets was associated with an improvement in the trauma team performance TEAM scores. Further studies are needed to confirm these results but they already encourage the consideration of nontechnical skills in the management of severe trauma patients.