Evaluation and development of integrated teams: the use of Significant Event Analysis

Significant Event Analysis (SEA) is a practical, problem-solving technique that can help teams learn from their experiences and generate practical solutions to complex issues. It has mainly been conducted in Primary Health Care Teams (PHCTs) with the use of an external facilitator. Although SEA is envisioned to address issues of integration and complement routine audit, there is limited evidence that this has been achieved. This paper reports on a 1 day workshop during which team members were trained to use SEA to address issues of service integration. This paper presents an evaluation of the workshop in order to determine if SEA is a feasible tool to support and encourage team self-evaluation without external facilitation. The main barriers to SEA are discussed as well as the need for longitudinal research to assess the impact of SEA on integration of the team and wider service.