Table 1 Glossary of terms

Busy-ness (of hospital organisation life)

For Levine (2005), busy-ness was a state of or subjective experience of having a lot to do, and perceiving that you don’t have much time for other activities beyond your current work, with two components: speed and activity. When you are busy, you perceive that you are not available to complete much else, and that you need to work or concentrate on a task or tasks.

Pace (of hospital organisation life)

The rate of at which clinical and non-clinical work is being progressed; the psychological or subjective experience of rapidity of work, and density of perceptions of this.

Speed of hospitals (also referred to as the tempo of hospitals)

The relative rapidity of staff movement, and rate of activities being done e.g., walking pace between wards, time available to do a drug round; or as a global measure of staff activities.

Briskness

Staff quickness; their liveliness and vigour.

Step up or stepping up the pace

The act of increasing speed or pace: a feeling of accelerating busy-ness.

Four-hour rule in Emergency Departments

Based on the UK experience, Australia introduced the National Emergency Access Target (NEAT) in 2011. This states that patients should be admitted, discharged or transferred within 4 h of arrival, in Emergency Departments (Ngo, H. et al. 2018; Sullivan, C. et al. 2014).

ETTO principle (efficiency-thoroughness trade-off)

This principle, expounded by Hollnagel (2009), suggests that people must make a trade-off between the resources of preparing an activity and the resources in completing that activity. This could be a trade-off of thoroughness over efficiency, or efficiency over thoroughness. Thoroughness and efficiency cannot be maximised at the same time.