Presentation description

In the trauma bay of an Emergency Room, the cohesion and efficiency of the surgical trauma team are crucial for the care and survival of the patient. Previous studies on team efficiency have demonstrated that efficiency is influenced by team members' perceptions of their leader. Many factors may impact how team members perceive their leaders, but alarmingly, gender bias is one of them, despite other evidence suggesting that there is no difference in leadership quality across gender. As a result, the efficiency of the team, and therefore patient health outcomes, may be negatively affected by biased perceptions of women vs. men leaders. We analyzed leadership dynamics and possible biases using a sample of 118 videos recorded in the trauma bay. We started by developing a coding scheme containing 30+ events, measured in 5-minute intervals. Two factors we recorded were leaders' experience (resident physician or attending physician) and leader gender. For the preliminary analysis, we counted the number of commands given by leaders and any time a command needed to be repeated. We found no difference between the frequency of repeated commands among female and male residents. However, we observed that female attendings were twice as likely to repeat themselves as male attendings. We also observed differences in the timing of repeats between residents and attendings, such that attendings repeated themselves more frequently near the beginning of the procedure than residents. This may be a result of attendings' increased proactivity and greater expertise in recognizing potential problems.