Medical Team Training
David Baker - Principal Research Scientist
A recent report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) entitled To Err Is Human suggests that medical errors cause up to 98,000 deaths each year. This report received high visibility in the national news media. With it, the IOM issued a number of recommendations to reduce medical errors, including the need to “establish interdisciplinary team training programs, such as simulation, that incorporate proven methods for team management.”
Throughout the health care community, small groups of individuals work together in intensive care units, operating rooms, labor and delivery wards, and family-medicine practices. To make safe and efficient patient care a priority, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, and other health professionals must coordinate their activities. However, even though a myriad of conditions addressed by health care professionals require interdisciplinary teams, members of these teams are rarely trained together; furthermore, they often come from separate disciplines and diverse educational programs.
Team training programs have been designed to address the interdisciplinary nature of the work and the necessity of cooperation among the health care workers who perform it.
At the request of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the TRICARE Management Activity of the Department of Defense, David Baker, a Principal Research Scientist at AIR, is leading a team in establishing guidelines for what represents “best practices” in medical team training programs. This guidance is based upon a comprehensive review of medical team training programs sponsored by the Department of Defense and the private sector. David and the AIR team are also developing ready-to-use tools for health care facilities interested in engaging in medical team training. Among these tools is a new medical team training curriculum that will be made available to DoD, public and private hospitals interested in training their staff in teamwork.
Because of the far-reaching importance of this work, representatives from AIR, the DoD and AHRQ have been invited to brief the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and several other regulatory organizations that oversee physician education, licensure, and board certification. These organizations all currently recognize the importance of teamwork in providing quality care to patients and are considering issuing more formal requirements for team training.
Additional information about the project is available on AIR’s web site by going to www.air.org/teams/index.html.