ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses surgical decision-making in both a clinical and research context and introduces a multimodal approach to measuring and assessing surgical decision-making. It outlines the role of decisionmaking within the ‘systems approach’ to surgical safety. The chapter describes some important features of surgical decision-making in its clinical context. It provides a brief overview of some of the methods available for studying surgical decision-making. Decision-making is becoming increasingly prominent in the surgical skills and training literature. Surgeons are faced with important choices at all stages of patient care and their decisions may be made in very different ways. There is a substantial established body of theory and experimental research into the psychology of decision-making and the related field of problem solving, and the cognitive processes that they involve. Self-report, typically elicited in interviews, offers the opportunity for detailed exploration of particular decision-making issues.
