ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief account of the development of the Anaesthetists’ Non-Technical Skills (ANTS) system and considers how this system may find a suitable home in the UK anaesthetic curriculum. A conventional approach to instructing anaesthetic trainees in the use of the NTS highlighted in the ANTS system would be to incorporate the underlying theoretical concepts into classroom-style teaching and then build on that base during clinical training by demonstrating application of those principles. The difficulty with the cascade approach to incorporating NTS into anaesthetic training was not just a problem of becoming familiar with observing behaviours, using the ANTS system and considering how best to give feedback. The ANTS system allows discussion and emphasis on specific NTS behaviours either observed or thought to be deficient or absent, rather than comments which are difficult to interpret or may be interpreted as personality assessments.
