Doing teamwork in obstetric emergencies

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Abstract

The paper reports on the preliminary findings of a project on teamwork in obstetric emergencies and focuses in particular on the relationship between physical space and professional role enactment in interaction. Although interaction analysis has privileged the analysis of talk, recent work has placed emphasis on the importance of other semiotic modalities and the need for a more holistic analysis of social action. This is particularly relevant to teamwork where space, room arrangement and artifacts play a role in team dynamics and work processes. However there is dearth of studies on medical teamwork particularly in secondary care (for notable exceptions see Moore et al. 2010) from a sociolinguistic perspective. The need for analysing work space arrangements and the intersection with team communication and professional roles, especially in the context of medical emergencies has been raised in recent research (Dean et al. 2016) and our paper aims to address this gap.
We draw on video recordings of simulated obstetric emergencies and discuss the ways in which senior and junior medical professionals negotiate their role in interaction. We take an ethnographic approach and are interested in analyzing the dynamics of teamwork in the context of 4 episodes. Our findings show that effective teamwork is embodied and hence not only verbally achieved; spatial design provides the context within which bodies act and move in the maternity rooms, and positioning in this context is part of claiming roles and responsibilities. We show the difference between senior and junior professionals and close the paper with a discussion of our next steps and emergent theoretical framework.

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