Teaming Up: Components of Safety Under High Risk

In this text scientific themes are explored with direct application to modern society.

Its aim is to draw together the knowledge of scientific experts as well as the experience of representatives from different aspects of industry and public life.

It addresses the issues of error and lack of teamwork in high-risk working environments.

Typical of these are the aeroplane cockpit, the operating room or the "ground zero" of disaster relief teams.

In all these professions and workplaces, the employees are under high levels of stress, have an enormous workload and often have to do more than one thing at the same time.

While simultaneously completing mental and motor tasks, they are also often faced with unexpected situations in which a great deal of risk is involved - and in which they can't be sure of the final outcome.

The researchers' goal is to find ways to minimize human error, to understand the interaction amongst the members of the team fulfilling the task.

Specialized training programmes, good management and clear rules that lay out which member is responsible for making decisions can be first steps in the right direction. All of these are factors that can have an effect on the making and managing of errors.

This book is one of the results of the ongoing project "Group Interaction in High Risk Environments (GIHRE)" sponsored by Gottlieb Daimler-und Karl Benz-Stiftung (G Daimler and K Benz Foundation) based in Ladenburg, Germany.

The project brings together experts from aerospace, clinical medicine, nuclear power, psychology, linguistics and psycholinguistics, and is co-ordinated by the Psycholinguistics Group at the Institute for German Language and Linguistics at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin.