Surgical Team Structure: How Familiarity and Team Size Influence Communication Effectiveness in Military Surgical...

Preventable patient harm has persisted in health care despite recent advances to reduce errors. There is increasing recognition that non-technical skills, including communication and relationships, greatly impact interprofessional team performance and health care quality. Team familiarity and size are critical structural components that potentially influence information flow, communication, and efficiency.

In this exploratory, prospective, cross-sectional study, we investigated the key structural components of surgical teams and identified how surgical team structure shapes communication effectiveness. Using total population sampling, we recruited surgical clinicians who provide direct patient care at a 138-bed military medical center. We used statistical modeling to characterize the relationship between communication effectiveness and five predictors: team familiarity, team size, surgical complexity, and the presence of surgical residents and student anesthesia professionals.

We surveyed 137 surgical teams composed of 149 multidisciplinary clinicians for an 82% response rate. The mean communication effectiveness score was 4.61 (SD = 0.30), the average team size was 4.53 (SD = 0.69) persons, and the average surgical complexity was 10.85 relative value units (SD = 6.86). The surgical teams exhibited high variability in familiarity, with teams co-performing 26% (SD = 0.16) of each other's surgeries. We found for every unit increase in team familiarity, communication effectiveness increased by 0.36 (P ≤ .05), whereas adding one additional member to the surgical team decreased communication effectiveness by 0.1 (P ≤ .05). Surgical complexity and the influence of residents and students were not associated with communication effectiveness.

For military surgical teams, greater familiarity and smaller team sizes were associated with small improvements in communication effectiveness. Military leaders can likely enhance team communication by engaging in a thoughtful and concerted program to foster cohesion by building familiarity and optimizing team size to meet task and cognitive demands. We suggest leaders develop bundled approaches to improve communication by integrating team familiarity and team size optimization into current evidence-based initiatives to enhance performance.