I was a little disturbed to hear myself described as an “expert” on operating theatre safety last week, when I was giving a lecture on my favourite pet subject on our surgical MSc course. This was thanks to my role as (ex)theatre director and nagger-in-chief for the WHO checklist.

My interest in safety has been fuelled by being on the receiving end of theatre adverse incident reports for the last five years (the main message from which is that doctors are very bad at submitting AIRs unless it’s about the lack of theatre blues in the changing rooms). And, of course there’s nothing like giving evidence at an inquest to concentrate one’s mind about safety and I’ve had to do that twice this month.

So, back to those non-technical skills in theatre. Before you all switch off, let me say that my response was similar to yours when I first started reading about this subject but my attitude has changed. As doctors, our training, (or mine, anyway) was almost entirely around technical skills and academic knowledge (admittedly quite important) and anything about ’soft’ skills (communication, leadership) was regarded as touchy-feely, politically correct nonsense.

By the time we graduate, our professional attitudes are fixed. Start talking about ’situational awareness’ or ‘communication styles’ at this stage and it will elicit a predictable response from most surgeons (and anaesthetists). In aviation, in contrast, non-technical skills are taught to students from day one. Pilots know that technical excellence alone will not guarantee a safe flight. We need to be teaching these skills much earlier in our medical education.

Anyone who works in theatre will see these non-technical skills come into play. If Mr Grumpy is in a  mood because there weren’t enough sodding theatre blues (again), that will affect how the whole operating list runs. Although I hate to admit it, the person wielding the scalpel generally functions as the team leader - if Mr Grumpy snaps at the scrub nurse when asked about what kit he wants and everyone’s walking on eggshells, that’s when disasters happen. There’s little communication, staff don’t ask questions and there’s precious little interest from the rest of team (remember those occasions when things start to go wrong and all we can hear in the background is the ODP discussing  the X-factor, completely oblivious to impending disaster).

The medical profession has not been good at learning from it’s mistakes - for a start, we’re bad at reporting and acknowledging them and, secondly, we think it’ll never happen to us if we work hard and know our anatomy. Take the nephrectomy disaster in Wales in 2000 (when due to human error surgeons removed the patient’s wrong kidney) - everyone thought that was a one-off which could never happen again. Despite massive publicity, it has been repeated at least three times in the UK.

Evidence shows that theatre teams which gel well, communicate freely and trust each other can retrieve potentially catastrophic situations. Mr Grumpy’s team, I suspect, wouldn’t get away with it if things went wrong. And, anything which keeps me out of the coroner’s court gets my vote.