As TTL it is vital that you have excellent situational awareness skills. What typifies great TTLs is their ability to work at all three levels of situational awareness.
Most importantly, the role of the TTL is to keep things moving and to plan for the next stages of the patient journey. That means that they should always be asking themselves about level 3 situational awareness issues (projection).
- Level 1 – Perception of data and of elements of environment (what’s happening around me?)
- Level 2 – Comprehension (what does it mean?)
- Level 3 – Projection (what does this mean will happen in the next x minutes and how can we optimise this for our patient/team)
A highly functioning trauma team will, at any moment, be doing what was projected by the TTL/team earlier. The TTL should be monitoring this AND projecting, planning and communicating what comes next. e.g. ‘OK team I can see the femoral block is going in, let’s get the splint on in the next 5 mins so we can be in scan in 10’.
Use level 3 awareness to be the high performing TTL who is proactive and not reactive.
vb
S
Further reading
Zero Point Survey https://www.stemlynsblog.org/the-zero-point-survey/
Human Factors in the ED https://www.stemlynsblog.org/human-factors-in-the-ed/
Great Handover https://www.stemlynsblog.org/great-handover/
Crisis Resource Management – LITFL https://litfl.com/crisis-resource-management/
Situational Awareness – RCEMLearning https://www.rcemlearning.co.uk/reference/non-technical-skills/
