Project Abstract:
TeamSTEPPS:
Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety
- Industry: Health care
- Business Need: Team Training
- Client: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Department of Defense (DoD)
Throughout the health care community, small groups of individuals work together in intensive care units (ICU), 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.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of the work and the necessity of cooperation among the workers who perform it, teamwork is critical to ensuring patient safety and error avoidance. Teams make fewer mistakes than do individuals, especially when each team member knows his or her responsibilities, as well as those of other team members. However, simply installing a team structure does not automatically ensure it will operate effectively. TeamSTEPPS is required to maximize team effectiveness.
TeamSTEPPS teaches the core facets of teamwork and their relationship to critical performance-based, attitude-based, and knowledge-based outcomes. These core facets are Leadership, Situation Monitoring, Mutual Support, and Communication.
• Leadership is the ability to direct and coordinate the activities of other team members.
• Situation Monitoring is the process of actively scanning situational elements to gain awareness of the situation in which the team functions.
• Mutual Support is the ability to anticipate and support other team members’ needs through accurate knowledge about their responsibilities and workload.
• Communication is the process by which information is clearly and accurately exchanged among team members.
TeamSTEPPS is used within the DoD and is available to any health care facility free of charge. For more information, please contact David Baker of the American Institutes for Research at 202-403-5627 or dbaker@air.org.