Improving the effectiveness of group decision-making

Abstract

The authors have undertaken a field study of daily decision-making processes in groups under uncertainty, in the health care domain. The work follows the tradition of naturalistic decision-making (NDM) research. It aims to understand how groups in this high reliability context conceptualize and internalize uncertainties, and how they handle them in order to achieve effective decision-making in their everyday activities.

In close cooperation with a teaching hospital in Austria, the authors have developed and tested a training course on group decision-making in the field of anesthesia and intensive care. The training course was intended to help participants improve their performance in group decision-making. Training was focused on acquiring the knowledge and experience successfully to make such decisions.

This report documents the last phases of the research project Decision-making in groups under uncertainty, in which the authors propose an improvement to group decision-making procedures, in the form of a training course. It describes the development of the training course, its implementation, results obtained and improvements made based on feedback from practitioners.