Trauma patients recover faster when medical teams know each other well, new study finds

A new study reveals trauma patients recover faster when medical teams have established familiarity and trust in each other's expertise.

When a trauma patient enters the emergency department, their potential for survival often depends on what happens within the first minutes after their arrival. After studying trauma resuscitation teams at UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh, the largest major trauma center in Pennsylvania, it’s clear that trauma teams aren’t organised ahead of time – they’re formed on the fly. Some team members may have worked together many times before, while others may be meeting for the first time.

Those minutes can be chaotic, fast-paced and high-stakes. The patient is usually rolled in on a stretcher, bleeding, barely breathing and surrounded by alarms and shouting. At the bedside are emergency physicians, anesthesiologists, surgeons, nurses and respiratory therapists – a large team of dedicated health care providers. Everyone has a job. Everyone is moving fast. When it works well, it looks almost effortless. When it doesn’t, small delays can have big consequences.

Medical professionals often say that “teamwork matters” in health care. But only a few studies show how teamwork affects patient outcomes or point to concrete, practical ways to make teams work better together.

This knowledge gap motivated us to get together to study this issue. One of us is an intensive care unit physician and the other is an organizational scientist who studies teams in a variety of settings. We based our approach on a classic concept from behavioral science called transactive memory systems.

Traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, are the leading cause of death for young people worldwide. Across all ages, trauma is one of the top killers. Because trauma is widespread, even small adjustments to how emergency teams coordinate can help save lives and shorten recovery periods for patients.

This is where transactive memory systems, TMS, come in. TMS are a shared understanding within a team of who knows what and who is good at what. A team doesn’t succeed because everyone knows everything, but because people rely on one another’s expertise. The team works best when each person knows what they are responsible for, what other team members are experts in, and whom to turn to when a specific problem comes up.