Safer Surgery part 26. 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. | 224 Safer Surgery Yule et al 2006 and systematic behavioural task analysis Manser and Wehner 2002 Weinger et al. 1994 . Team Performance and Patient Safety The process of providing healthcare is inherently interdisciplinary involving physicians nurses and allied health professionals from different specialties. In the patient safety literature it has been widely recognized that team performance is crucial to providing safe patient care and that many of the factors contributing to adverse events in healthcare originate from flawed teamwork rather than from a lack of clinical skills. Thus teamwork has become a key factor addressed by many system-based interventions to improve patient safety and medical education standards Carthey et al. 2001 Chassin and Becher 2002 Davies 2001 Donchin et al. 1995 Lingard et al. 2004 Manser 2009 Sutcliffe et al. 2004 Wilson et al. 1995 . The quality and efficiency of patient care as well as the confidence of patients in healthcare providers were shown to be affected by poor coordination among providers at various organizational levels Edmondson 1996 Gerteis et al. 1993 Gittell et al. 2000 Young et al. 1998 . It has been argued that there is much rhetoric about how to set up medical teams while the process of teamwork in patient care has not been studied systematically Cott 1997 . Given the importance of teamwork to safe and efficient patient care both clinical competence and the ability to work in teams need to be assessed when studying the professional behaviour of healthcare providers Fletcher et al. 2002 Gaba et al. 1998 Wilson et al. 2005 . However many studies of teamwork in healthcare still centre around the main research themes identified by Nagi 1975 a status power authority and influence b roles and professional identities and c decision-making and communication Manser 2009 . In recent years significant progress has been made in research on healthcare teams Manser 2008 Manser 2009 and this progress is clearly documented by the
