Teamwork in healthcare: A close-up view of the frontline - Prof Jeff Bezemer

This lecture explores how health professionals work together. It pulls together a decade of observational research of teamwork in operating rooms and intensive care units, highlighting ways in which health professionals engage in concerted efforts to accomplish day-to-day clinical tasks. It draws attention to social practices that facilitate cooperative interventional action, such as the placing of team members around the patient, the mobilisation of attention, monitoring and reading of each other’s bodily conduct and course of action, joint inspection and reading of the patient’s body, passing of objects, calibration of understanding, recruitment and provision of assistance, instruction for action and decision making. The account of these practices is inspired, foremost, by the works of Erving Goffman, Charles Goodwin, and Gunther Kress, who each have developed a rich conceptual apparatus for describing -and thus for scrutinising and appreciating- the fabric of everyday social activit