Good communication is essential within teams dealing with emergency situations. In this paper we look at communications within a resuscitation team performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. Communication underpins efficient collaboration, joint coordination of work, and helps to construct a mutual awareness of the situation. Poor communication wastes valuable time and can ultimately lead to lifethreatening mistakes. Although training sessions frequently focus on medical knowledge and procedures, soft skills, such as communication receive less attention. This paper analyses communication problems in the case of CPR and proposes an architecture that merges a situation awareness model and the belief-desire-intention (BDI) approach in multi-agent systems. The architecture forms the basis of an agent-based simulator used to assess communication protocols in CPR teams.
Communications and MSAMany studies identify the solid link between communication, and SA and MSA that strongly affects a team's performance [15].Communication failures maybe classified along several dimensions: the content (messages are unclear or unstructured) [7] the entities themselves (members of the team do not always share the same communication code [3], and the intended purpose of the communication (members do not always correctly interpret the message). Other reasons for communication failures arise from an excessively noisy environment, stress, and the lack of accurate communication strategies in a particular critical situation, etc. [26].The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the United States recommends several information exchange standards for effective communication that will increase MSA [2] (Table 1)