Team debriefings in healthcare: aligning intention and impact
Michaela Kolbe, Sven Schmutz, Julia Seelandt, Walter Eppich, Jan B. Schmutz
Abstract
### What you need to know The covid-19 pandemic has renewed focus on debriefings to improve performance among healthcare providers: debriefings help teams learn quickly and manage patients more safely.1234 However, in some circumstances, debriefings may harm more than help. In this article we introduce debriefing and its benefits, highlight the potential consequences when debriefing intentions blur, and offer guidance to navigate shifting debriefing objectives, for example during instances of clinicians’ distress related to patient care. Team debriefings (also known as after action reviews) are guided meetings during which members discuss, interpret, and learn from recent events.56 Debriefings will typically include both retrospective (eg, collaborative sense making in information-rich and ambiguous environments) and prospective reflection (eg, sustaining positive performance, planning treatments, anticipating problems).57 They foster reflection on clinical practice for the individual and the team. Various debriefing tools and structures are in use, such as TALK (Target, Analysis, Learning, Key Actions),8 PEARLS (Promoting Excellence and Reflective Learning in Simulation),9 and REFLECT (Review the event, Encourage team participation, Focused feedback, Listen to each other, Emphasise key points, Communicate clearly, Transform the future). …