Zoom link: https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/63761475524

On 10 March at 10:00 via Zoom, Jerry M. Guo will give a seminar entitled

Transactive Memory Systems and Trauma Team Performance

Abstract

We investigate the effect of transactive memory systems on the performance of hospital trauma resuscitation teams. Known colloquially as knowledge of who knows what, a transactive memory system (TMS) enables teams to assign tasks to the most qualified members and to rely on those members to perform and coordinate their tasks effectively. The uncertain nature of trauma teams’ tasks and the extreme time pressure under which they operate make TMS especially valuable in the context of trauma care. Behavioral indicators of transactive memory are coded from video recordings of trauma resuscitations in a hospital emergency department. Objective measures of team performance, including patient lengths of stay in the intensive care unit and in the hospital, are obtained from hospital records. Results of analyzing data from 121 patients reveal that patients treated by trauma teams with strong TMS experience significantly shorter lengths of stay in the ICU and in the hospital than patients treated by trauma teams with weaker TMS. The magnitude of the effect was large: increasing TMS by one standard deviation (0.31 on a five-point scale) was associated with a reduction in hospital length of stay of 2.91 days and a reduction in ICU length of stay of 1.91 days. Reductions in length of stay benefit patients, reduce health care costs, and free up hospital resources to care for other patients, an outcome that is especially valuable in times such as the current pandemic. We conclude with a discussion of how to strengthen TMS in trauma resuscitation teams