Affordable Access

Publisher Website

Situational Awareness in the Context of Clinical Practice.

Authors
  • Feller, Shani1
  • Feller, Liviu1
  • Bhayat, Ahmed2
  • Feller, Gal3
  • Khammissa, Razia Abdool Gafaar4
  • Vally, Zunaid Ismail5
  • 1 University of Witwatersrand, Fir Avenue, Bantry Bay, Cape Town 2050, South Africa. , (South Africa)
  • 2 Department of Community Dentistry, School of Dentistry, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0084, South Africa. , (South Africa)
  • 3 Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital, Johannesburg 2193, South Africa. , (South Africa)
  • 4 Department of Periodontics and Oral Medicine, School of Dentistry, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0084, South Africa. , (South Africa)
  • 5 Department of Prosthodontics, School of Dentistry, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0084, South Africa. , (South Africa)
Type
Published Article
Journal
Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland)
Publication Date
Dec 04, 2023
Volume
11
Issue
23
Identifiers
DOI: 10.3390/healthcare11233098
PMID: 38063666
Source
Medline
Keywords
Language
English
License
Unknown

Abstract

In the context of clinical practice, situational awareness refers to conscious awareness (knowledge), which is a mental model of a given clinical situation in terms of its elements and the significance of their interrelation. Situational awareness (SA) facilitates clinical reasoning, diagnostic accuracy, and appropriate goal-directed performance, and it enables clinicians to immediately adapt treatment strategies in response to changes in clinical situational actualities and to modify the course of goal-directed activities accordingly. It also helps clinicians prepare future operational plans and procedures based on the projection of situational developments. SA, therefore, is an important prerequisite for safe clinical procedures. The purpose of this narrative review is to highlight certain cognitive and external (environmental) situational factors that influence the development of situational awareness. Understanding the dynamic, adaptive, and complex interactions between these factors may assist clinicians and managers of healthcare systems in developing methods aimed at facilitating the acquisition of accurate clinical situational awareness and, in turn, may bring about a reduction in the incidence of SA, diagnostic, and operational errors.

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This record was last updated on 12/23/2023 and may not reflect the most current and accurate biomedical/scientific data available from NLM. The corresponding record at NLM can be accessed at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38063666
Report this publication

Statistics

Seen <100 times