During his first seven days in Afghanistan, Dr Mark de Rond saw 174 casualties brought into Camp Bastion’s military hospital. Six were already dead. On the living, surgeons operated for 134 hours and performed 23 amputations. This small hospital uses more blood product than all of Scotland combined.
For six weeks last summer – beginning in June 2011 – Mark de Rond, a Reader in Strategy and Organisation at Cambridge Judge Business School, embedded himself with the surgeons at the field hospital to study how these high performing teams work together under extreme pressure, forced to make life and death decisions in the blink of an eye and faced with harrowing injuries. For de Rond, studying teamwork in extremis allows him to more easily observe the best and worst of social coordination.
“Ethnography is the written account of fieldwork – closely tied to social anthropology. It is an old fashioned attempt at trying to understand teams by living with them under similar conditions,” explains de Rond.
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Welcome to Bastion: warzone ethnography with the combat surgeons
28 June 2012
A Cambridge academic was given unprecedented access to the military hospital at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, to study the teamwork of the combat surgeons. The unique photographs he took reveal the realities of life and death in the operating theatre of modern war.