Top-down policy directives, such as targets and their associated protocols, may be driven politically rather than clinically and can be described as macro-political texts. While targets supposedly provide incentives for healthcare services, they may unintentionally shape practices of accommodation rather than implementation, deflecting…

Focused dialogue, as good communication between practitioners, offers a condition of possibility for development of high levels of situation awareness in surgical teams. This has been termed "achieving ensemble". Situation awareness grasps what is happening in time and space with regard to one's own unfolding work in relation to that of…

The journal "Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory and Practice" has, under Geoff Norman's leadership, promoted a collaborative approach to investigating educationally-savvy and innovative health care practices, where academic medical educators can work closely with healthcare practitioners to improve patient care and safety. But…

Purpose: The paper seeks to show that narrative close call reporting is one strand of an ongoing collaborative inquiry project with 300 staff aiming to improve teamwork in operating theatres in a large UK hospital. How teams deal with close calls ("accidents waiting to happen") reveals resourcefulness but exposes flaws, including…

Work in progress is reported for a research project aiming to improve multiprofessional teamworking in operating theatres through iterative educational intervention. Experimental design is combined with collaborative inquiry. The hypothesis is: will planned, complex educational intervention focused upon improving communication in teamwork lead to…

Medical students must be prepared for working in inter-professional and multi-disciplinary clinical teams centred on a patient's care pathway. While there has been a good deal of rhetoric surrounding patient-centred medical education, there has been little attempt to conceptualise such a practice beyond the level of describing education of…