Recruiting organisation: Copenhagen Academy for Medical Education and Simulation (CAMES), Denmark
Supervisor: Dr. Peter Dieckmann
Doctoral Candidate: Marija Topalovic
Secondments: UZH, Switzerland, 2 months; Tue Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 3 months
Summary: The PhD project aims to enhance the understanding of conflict management in the operating room (OR) setting by exploring conflicts and respective conflict management strategies and to investigate simulation as a tool for improving conflict management skills among the OR healthcare professionals.
Background
The operating room is a high-stakes environment where healthcare teams perform life-saving and life-quality-enhancing procedures. A growing body of literature recognizes the critical role of teamwork in the OR, considering it vital for patient safety. In the surgical context, teamwork can be defined as acting to facilitate the smooth progression through surgical procedures, while more broadly, it is defined as a process of interactions among team members who combine resources to resolve task demands.
However, both working in a team and the OR setting can give rise to conflicts. Factors such as high-pressure situations, unstable team composition, different perceptions of team structure, power struggles, and hierarchy, among others, can lead to conflicts. If not managed effectively, conflicts can lead to communication breakdowns and adverse surgical events, ultimately compromising patient safety, as well as to emotional exhaustion and decreased work engagement among healthcare professionals.
Conflict management is one of the interpersonal team processes and is considered essential for the effectiveness of all other team processes, yet only a few studies are focusing on the interpersonal processes within OR teams. While an increasing number of studies support the importance of conflict management training for operating room teams, the optimal approach remains unclear. At the same time, some believe simulation could be explored as an effective approach. To address this gap, this project aims to explore conflicts and conflict management strategies in the OR environment and develop a training tool for conflict management.
Approach
The project consists of three interconnected studies. The first study aims to deepen the understanding of conflict management in the operating room (OR) setting by examining conflict types and existing resolution strategies. Using ethnography—an immersive approach to studying social interactions and behaviors—researchers will observe conflicts as they unfold, how individuals and teams navigate them, and their impact on teamwork and patient care. Building on these insights, the second study will redesign an existing simulation-based learning sequence to trigger conflicts in simulated scenarios and facilitate debriefing to reflect on their emergence, triggers, and effects on performance and well-being in the OR. The third study, which involves interviews conducted after the simulation course, will evaluate the simulation course as a tool for teaching conflict management by gathering participants’ perspectives on the course, the insights they gain, and how they apply these insights in clinical practice. The different methods used in the PhD project will allow us to investigate simulation as a tool for conflict management in the OR from various angles and with various stakeholders.
Research Team
The Doctoral Candidate is employed at Copenhagen Academy for Medical Education and Simulation (CAMES), Capital Region of Denmark, a leading simulation-based training centre committed to increasing the quality and safety of patient treatment through research, innovation, and educational activities within medical and surgical simulation. The research team is led by Prof. Peter Dieckmann, a work and organizational psychologist, senior scientist at CAMES, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, and Professor of Healthcare Education and Patient Safety at the University of Stavanger.
During the PhD project, there will be collaborations with a local hospital in Copenhagen where fieldwork will be conducted and with course leaders at CAMES.