Team Dynamics and Nontechnical Skills Perception During the Disaster Response in Mozambique in 2019: A Survey Study Among the Italian Emergency Medical Team

Abstract

Abstract Objective: Team dynamics and nontechnical skills in general are crucial for emergency medical teams (EMT). No study has ever examined these important issues during a real mission in the field. This study aimed to better investigate team dynamics and nontechnical skills for EMTs; it tried to understand if a real mission, when the people are obliged to work together for the first time, without a prior specific training focused on teamwork, is enough or not to work as an effective team in the field. Methods: The study is designed as a pre-test/post-test survey study, and it collected data from 51 people deployed to Mozambique in 2019. Three indexes (the self-efficacy (SE), the teamwork (TW), and the overall team’s performance (TW12)) were calculated as the average value of the rating given by all the participants. Open text feedback was also collected. Results: A positive trend was observed comparing the “post” data to the “pre” data, but results did not show a statistical significance, with the only exception of stratified analyses showing a P-value less than 0.05 for SE and TW12 for some categories. Conclusions: According to the study findings, humanitarian workers feel good but not at their best; training programs focused on team dynamics can be really useful to improve self-confidence of people leaving for a mission.