What governs the way in which people work together and handle technology in high risk environments? The understanding of decision making, communication and the other dimensions of team interaction within aircrews and other teams in highly stressful situations, is based on a multitude of diverse factors, each with its own literature and individual studies. This book is about how teams function in just such situations, providing a uniquely integrated and interdisciplinary account of the dynamics and main explanatory factors of team interaction under high workload. The book stems from the interdisciplinary research project 'Group Interaction in High Risk Environments' (GIHRE), a Collegium of the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation. The goals of the project, and therefore the book, are to investigate, analyze and understand the behavior of professional groups working in high risk environments and to develop practical suggestions for enhancing performance. A central focus of this book is how groups in these professions deal with the factors that can threaten the safety and effectiveness of their task performance, whether these factors are part of the environment or part of the team itself. Four representative workplaces were investigated in three broad settings: in aviation, the cockpit of a commercial airliner; in medicine, the operating room and the intensive care unit of a hospital; in nuclear power, the control room of a nuclear power plant. The international and interdisciplinary composition of the Collegium ensures the book features a variety of different methodological and conceptual approaches, which are brought to bear at both theoretical and practical levels. Readers working in all related fields will find value in the case descriptions, the academic synthesis of the similarities between them, and ways to approach new challenges; specialists in applied psychology, human factors and technical management will gain new insights.

All accidents and incidents at the workplace, and the resulting consequences, are tied to human beings and their actions. Although their avoidance has been a crucial part of training in aviation for the past twenty years, it has been largely ignored in many other occupations with team structures similar to those in aviation. In such professions and workplaces, those involved are under high stress, with enormous workloads, simultaneously completing mental and motor tasks, facing unexpected situations involving great risk, and with uncertain final outcomes. The goal of researchers is to find ways to minimize human error and 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 the first steps to reducing and managing such errors. This book is a major result of the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation's 6th Berlin Colloquium, ’Interaction in High Risk Environments’, hosted in 2002 by the Psycholinguistic Group of the Humbolt University Institute for German Language and Linguistics. This group is affiliated with the ongoing research group ’Group Interaction in High Risk Environments (GIHRE)’ sponsored by the Foundation based in Ladenburg, Germany. The Colloquium brings together experts from aerospace, clinical medicine, nuclear power, psychology, linguistics and psycholinguistics, to include fields that have yet to be a major focus of scientific investigations. Together, the authors explore scientific advances with direct application to a range of high risk environments. The aim is to address the issues and root causes of error and lack of teamwork by combining the knowledge of scientific experts with experience gained in different fields of industry and public life. Chapters span space travel, risk in the cockpit, safety in medicine, nuclear submarine salvage, large construction sites, police

Advances in reactor designs, materials and human-machine interfaces guarantee safety and reliability of emerging reactor technologies, eliminating possibilities for high-consequence human errors as those which have occurred in the past. New instrumentation and control technologies based in digital systems, novel sensors and measurement approaches facilitate safety, reliability and economic competitiveness of nuclear power options. Autonomous operation scenarios are becoming increasingly popular to consider for small modular systems. This book belongs to a series of books on nuclear power published by InTech. It consists of four major sections and contains twenty-one chapters on topics from key subject areas pertinent to instrumentation and control, operation reliability, system aging and human-machine interfaces. The book targets a broad potential readership group - students, researchers and specialists in the field - who are interested in learning about nuclear power.

“Mariners´ Adaptive Performance under Stress” focuses on the research question of direct and indirect effects of varying conditions of task-integral cognitive and affective demands on adaptive performance of novice bridge operators. The work draws theoretically on contextual models of cognition as well as appraisal theoretical frameworks of affect elicitation and experience. The respective research hypotheses reflect expected individual and team-related adaptive responses at and after the onset of ambiguous trigger events with a prominent affective component when performing a complex ship management task. Adaptive performance was measured by means of behavioural parameters with a relevance to normal and critical operations: Visual behaviour of officers of the watch, Threat and Error Management and Non-Technical Skill performance of bridge crews, and risk-related crew decision-making. Additional surveys were employed for the assessment of the task-related affective states and trigger event appraisals. The results suggest that the observed adaptive performance, especially on the team level, is strongly affected by the co-occurrence of constraining context conditions and the conspicuousness of the affective component of emerging events. Consequently, the work argues for an integrated approach towards combining cognition and affect for modelling human behaviour in dynamic environments. It showcases the need for further research of cognition, affect and their combined effects in the naturalistic context of work in order to comprehend the behaviour of the human element in practice beyond the obscuring veil of hindsight and outcome-based evaluations.

This book presents selected topics in implementing a risk-based approach for complex engineering systems in general, and nuclear plants in particular. It addresses gap areas in implementing the risk-based approach to design, operation and regulation, covering materials reliability, digital system reliability, software reliability, human factor considerations, condition monitoring and prognosis, structural aspects in risk-based design as well as the application aspects like asset management for first-of-their-kind projects, strategic management and other academic aspect. Chapters are authored by renowned experts who address some of the identified challenges in implementation of risk-based approach in a clear and cogent manner, using illustrations, tables and photographs for ease of communication. This book will prove useful to researchers, professionals, and students alike.

Communications research in aviation is widely regarded by many in the healthcare community as the 'gold standard' to emulate. Yet healthcare and aviation differ in many ways, as do the vital communications shared among members of clinical teams. Aviation team communication should, then, be understood in terms of what lessons will benefit those who work in healthcare. In Improving Healthcare Team Communication, renowned experts provide insights from 'sharp end' operator research in high-hazard sectors that shed light on the performance of cognitive tasks including resource availability assessment, allocation, anticipation, prediction, trade-off decisions, speculation and negotiation. The book reports on recent field research to address what is known, and what needs to be learned, about team communication among operators. Students, clinicians and healthcare managers can find answers in it to the questions they face daily. How can healthcare information be better shared? What can we expect from its improvement, and how do we get there? Lessons learned from team communication research and experience in aviation and healthcare will point the way to improved patient safety.

Macrocognition Metrics and Scenarios: Design and Evaluation for Real-World Teams translates advances by scientific leaders in the relatively new area of macrocognition into a format that will support immediate use by members of the software testing and evaluation community for large-scale systems as well as trainers of real-world teams. Macrocognition is defined as how activity in real-world teams is adapted to the complex demands of a setting with high consequences for failure. The primary distinction between macrocognition and prior research is that the primary unit for measurement is a real-world team coordinating their activity, rather than individuals processing information, the predominant model for cognition for decades. This book provides an overview of the theoretical foundations of macrocognition, describes a set of exciting new macrocognitive metrics, and provides guidance on using the metrics in the context of different approaches to evaluation and measurement of real-world teams.

Operating theatres are very private workplaces. There have been few research investigations into how highly trained doctors and nurses work together to achieve safe and efficient anaesthesia and surgery. While there have been major advances in surgical and anaesthetic procedures, there are still significant risks for patients during operations and adverse events are not unknown. Due to rising concern about patient safety, surgeons and anaesthetists have looked for ways of minimising adverse events. Behavioural scientists have been encouraged by clinicians to bring research techniques used in other industries into the operating theatre in order to study the behaviour of surgeons, nurses and anaesthetists. Safer Surgery presents one of the first collections of studies designed to understand the factors influencing safe and efficient surgical, anaesthetic and nursing practice. The book is written by psychologists, surgeons and anaesthetists, whose contributions combine to offer readers the latest research techniques and findings from some of the leading investigators in this field. It is designed for practitioners and researchers interested in understanding the behaviour of operating theatre team members, with a view to enhancing both training and practice. The material is also suitable for those studying behaviour in other areas of healthcare or in high-risk work settings. The aims of the book are to: a) present the latest research on the behaviour of operating theatre teams b) describe the techniques being used by psychologists and clinicians to study surgeons, anaesthetists and theatre nurses' task performance c) outline the safety implications of the research to date.

How should we organize our selection or training procedures? In what way can a flight crew mediate problems? How are we to understand reported errors? Mechanisms in the Chain of Safety presents recent findings in aviation psychology, bringing fresh insights to such questions. Aviation psychologists study personnel selection and training; they evaluate the management of flight operations, and ultimately they analyse the things that went wrong. The strong interrelation between these components allows us to talk about a chain of safety. This volume appraises this chain of safety by considering the mechanisms that determine its effectiveness - input mechanisms, coping mechanisms and control mechanisms. Each contribution discusses a component of the chain while the book as a whole emphasizes and illustrates that understanding the connections between these parts is essential for the future. By addressing these issues the book leads to further considerations such as how mistakes are linked to training and how coping mechanisms should help us to understand errors and accidents. Mechanisms in the Chain of Safety will appeal to aviation professionals (human factors experts, safety managers, pilots, ATCOs, air navigation service providers, etc.) and academics, researchers, graduates and postgraduates in human factors and psychology. Although primarily written for the aviation industry, this book will also be of interest to other high-risk dynamic activities that face similar challenges: the need to present effective and safe outcomes to the public in general and the stakeholders in particular.

This resource aims to reduce injuries and fatalities on the fireground by preventing human error. It provides fire service professionals with the necessary communication, leadership, and decision-making tools to operate safely and effectively under stressful conditions. Although the concept of crew resource management has been around since the 1970s, this is the first book to apply C( to the fire service industry.