Minerva Work Solutions, PLLC is proud to have contributed to the knowledge behind Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing’s new release, “A Practical Guide to Crew Resource Management for Healthcare Teams.”
Visit the Cambridge Scholars Publishing Store to buy the book.
This book will help the reader’s team when confronted with complex, error-prone, or ambiguous situations by providing concrete steps in applying Crew Resource Management (CRM) skills. The reader will learn how to determine the situation, communicate clearly and concisely, feel safe asking questions, be assertive when safety is an issue, and support the team in preventing, avoiding, or mitigating errors and threats to performance. Readers will learn how to develop a CRM plan and briefing and how to debrief actions to constantly improve team performance. Applications of CRM in the healthcare professions are emphasized in the book through dialogue-based examples written by healthcare professionals and based on actual critical scenarios that allow readers to analyze real-time situations and see how to apply evidence-based CRM best practices.
CRM is a way of managing and optimizing team interactions, to improve performance, and positively impact safety that is based on observable behaviors and includes:
- Exchanging Information: determining what information to exchange to whom and when.
- Communicating: how to exchange information.
- Leading and Following: Leading is setting up psychological safety, articulating CRM expectations, and then modeling and rewarding those behaviors. Following is inquiring when they do not understand the leader or the situation, and then advocating and even asserting a position when they believe that safety is at risk.
- Mutually Supporting: offering and accepting physical, cognitive, psychological, and emotional support and providing feedback on both technical and non-technical behaviors.
The focus is to help you, as the professional, embed a proactive approach to your team interactions. The authors of this guide, cover the theoretical expertise and the applied experience to inform healthcare professionals on how to adopt CRM in practice. The authors include two intensive care physicians who are actively engaged in clinical practice at academic institutions; two research doctorates with broad and deep experience using scientific evidence to develop applied CRM programs for multiple industries; and one highly experienced CRM instructor who has designed and implemented CRM training for NASA astronauts and flight controllers, oil and gas drilling crews, emergency responders, and many other highly specialized teams. Collectively, we explain CRM in practical terms that are both evidence-based and directly applicable to daily healthcare practice. This guide leads you on the path to success through demonstrating how to continually practice CRM, empowering you with skills to inspire change, thereby ensuring that your own accountability for the safe delivery of healthcare is modeled and transferable in order to guide others in your organization.