GETTING US ALL ON THE SAME PAGE: A SCOPING REVIEW OF SHARED MENTAL MODELS IN ACUTE CARE MEDICAL TEAMS

Abstract

Purpose: Shared mental models (SMMs) represent commonly held understandings of task and team related knowledge within a team. Thought to facilitate implicit and adaptive coordination without the need for explicit communication, the construct has been thoroughly studied in non-health care settings. There has been increasing interest in the topic in the healthcare setting, but recent reviews have found that the construct is poorly defined and has significant heterogeneity in how it is measured (Floren et al., 2018). We conducted a scoping review examining the construct of SMMs in medical teams within the acute care setting. Method: Following the Arksey and O’Malley (2005) framework, five data bases were searched: Medline, CINAHL, PsychInfo, Web of Science, and Embase. Eligible studies examined SMMs in the context of medical teamwork in the acute care setting. Definitions, methods, and general study characteristics were examined. Results: Of the 1397 articles retrieved, 25 met eligibility criteria. The studies encompassed a variety of areas of clinical practice. There was no common definition for SMMs across the studies examined. The majority of studies (20/25) used quantitative methods with surveys, questionnaires, and observation being the most common. Conclusions: The construct of the SMM is poorly defined in the setting of acute care medical teams. Although many standard types of SMM measurement exist, few of the studies used these common methods. The lack of direct measurement of SMMs, especially in the case of observation, questions the validity of these studies. We propose a definition for SMMs in this context and a path forward for studying SMM in the acute care setting.