• Sylvia Bereknyei Merrell, David M Gaba, Aalok V Agarwala, Jeffrey B Cooper, Andrea L Nevedal, Steven M Asch, Steven K Howard, and Sara N Goldhaber-Fiebert.
• Department of Surgery, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California.
• Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2018 Aug 1; 44 (8): 477-484.

BackgroundAn emergency manual (EM) is a set of evidence-based crisis checklists, or cognitive aids, that can improve team performance. EMs are used in other safety-critical industries, and health care simulation studies have shown their efficacy, but use in clinical settings is nascent. A case study was conducted on the use of an EM during one intraoperative crisis, which entailed the assessment of the impact of the EM's use on teamwork and patient care and the identification of lessons for effectively using EMs during future clinical crises.MethodsIn a case study of a single crisis, an EM was used during a cardiac arrest at a tertiary care hospital that had systematically implemented perioperative EMs. Semistructured interviews were conducted with all six clinicians present, interview transcripts were iteratively coded, and thematic analysis was performed.ResultsAll clinician participants stated that EM use enabled effective team functioning via reducing stress of individual clinicians, fostering a calm work environment, and improving teamwork and communication. These impacts in turn improved the delivery of patient care during a clinical crisis and influenced participants' intended EM use during future appropriate crises.ConclusionIn this positive-exemplar case study, an EM was used to improve delivery of evidence-based patient care through effective clinical team functioning. EM use must complement rather than replace good clinician education, judgment, and teamwork. More broadly, understanding why and how things go well via analyzing positive-exemplar case studies, as a converse of root cause analyses for negative events, can be used to identify effective applications of safety innovations.Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Inc.

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