Understanding Non-Technical Skills (NTS) in Emergency-, Intensive care and Perioperative Nursing (EIP)

Background: NTS is important to prevent adverse events, and advanced patient care requires collaboration between different health professionals. Lack of conceptual understanding of NTS can limit awareness and make it difficult to understand when NTS fails. There is a need for common concepts across different professions. Purpose: To investigate the perception of NTS in Norwegian specialist nurses (EIP), to what extent the perceptions comply with the NANTS.no model, and how NTS agree across specialties. Method: A qualitative survey was conducted to examine how specialist nurses (EIP) perceive NTS. "Direct content analyses" as described by Hsieh and Shannon, were used. Responses were categorized according to profession for comparisons. Result: We found that EIP specialist nurses' understanding of NTS highly complied with NANTS.no . The percentage of concepts describing NTS was 67%, of which most (37 %) concerned teamwork and fewest (5.5 %) concerned decision making. There was high agreement across specialties. Conclusion: Agreement in understanding of NTS with NANTS.no . and across specialties was considerable and provides opportunities for collective training and learning to avoid adverse effects. Knowledge in NTS is important to develop conceptual understanding, and systematic training in NTS should be implemented in health education programs and clinical practice.