title: [Situational awareness: oversimplification of reality].
abstract: Situational awareness appears to be an attractive term to describe attentiveness when performing complex tasks in an operating theatre, as its meaning seems clear and it is considered useful. It is embraced for describing human behaviour in the aftermath of incidents and appears to provide a clear explanation of what went wrong. But it actually describes a wide range of aspects of human behaviour and therefore comprises a risk of oversimplification. As a consequence, hasty and unwarranted conclusions may be drawn about a complex situation, especially where its outcome is known, leading to hindsight bias. To understand what happened, it is necessary to reconstruct the entire situation as it evolved at the time, considering all the activities, people, circumstances and equipment involved. People are always part of a system, so the proposed monitoring devices will be of only limited use in preventing adverse events.
authors.affiliation: Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum, Afd. Heelkunde, Leiden.
authors.forename: Jaap
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hamming
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence / Q000592:standards*; D004501:Education, Medical; D006801:Humans; D019300:Medical Errors / Q000517:prevention & control*; D008505:Medical Staff, Hospital / Q000193:education*; D010820:Physicians / Q000523:psychology*