Every surgeon has begun his or her career as a medical undergraduate with a keen awareness of the basis for our assessments in the domains of knowledge, skills and attitudes. It is this last domain in which psychological and human factors are crucial to good outcomes of medical performance. In this issue of the Canadian Journal of Surgery (page 22), Mark Fleming and colleagues1 describe how they investigated the interpersonal competencies of cardiac surgery teams as a means to identify team members' attitudes toward teamwork. This is a most timely report, because it tackles some of the fundamental reasons for medical errors such as those reported in the Canadian Adverse Events Study.
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