Action request episodes in trauma team interactions in Japan and the UK - A multimodal analysis of joint actions in medical simulation

Grounding is a fundamental human practice for cooperation and collaboration in a joint activity, when more than two people interact. Emergency care is one such interactive situation, and whether a trauma team can efficiently establish and increment their common ground at an appropriate timing during the complex and fluid activity of emergency medical treatment is key to maximise collective competence to best perform as a trauma team. This article investigates recurrent patterns in the grounding process between the trauma team leader and the members, comparing the practices between Japan and the UK, using an eye-tracking device. The embodied practice of grounding was multimodally described, applying both quantitative multimodal corpus analytic and qualitative interactional linguistic approaches. The analysis has shown that five grounding episodes reoccurred, most of which were more ego-centric and one of them ba-centric interactions, drawing on intersubjectivity and the theory of ba in Western and Eastern philosophy respectively.