Collaborative Micro-Practices of Expert Healthcare Dyads: Implications for Medical Education

Area of Science:

• Healthcare teamwork and collaboration.
• Health professions education.
• Clinical practice improvement.

Background:

• Coordination failures persist in acute care despite teamwork training.
• Traditional training often overlooks the critical healthcare dyad.
• This study addresses how expert dyads build collaborative expertise.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore how expert healthcare dyads develop and sustain collaborative expertise.
• To identify key collaborative strategies within dyads.
• To inform health professions education on dyadic collaboration.

Main Methods:

• Conducted 10 semi-structured dyadic interviews with 20 expert healthcare professionals in acute care.
• Utilized template analysis, informed by relational coordination and distributed cognition.
• Employed deductive and open coding for thematic analysis.

Main Results:

• Identified four core collaborative strategies: connectedness, situation awareness, physical communication, and reflective practice.
• Found that trust is foundational to these strategies.
• Developed the Expert Dyad Framework (EDF) detailing relational and cognitive micro-practices.

Conclusions:

• The Expert Dyad Framework (EDF) offers a practice-informed tool for educators.
• Highlights dyadic collaboration as a key developmental target in health professions education.
• Extends existing teamwork models by focusing on dyadic micro-interactions.