Second, research studies on teamwork in healthcare usually exhibit small sample sizes because of the challenges of recruiting actual professional teams and carefully balancing research with patient care priorities. Therefore, researchers and practitioners often lack a common conceptual foundation for investigating teams and teamwork in healthcare. First, the conceptual and empirical literature examining teamwork is fragmented and research examining teamwork effectiveness is spread across disciplines including medicine, psychology and organisation science. 10 11 This inconsistency arises due to several reasons. 8 Some studies find a large effect of teamwork on performance outcomes (eg, Carlson et al 9) while others report small or no relationships. Having a closer look at the literature investigating healthcare teams we find mixed and sometimes even contradicting results about the relationship between teamwork and clinical performance. Healthcare is an evidence-based field and therefore administrators and providers are seeking evidence in the literature concerning the impact of teamwork on performance outcomes like patient mortality, morbidity, infection rates or adherence to clinical treatment guidelines. Today, experts agree that effective teamwork anchors safe and effective care at various levels of the healthcare systems 1–4 leading to a relatively recent shift towards team research and training. In order for a team to be effective individual team members need to collaborate and engage in teamwork. Although the clinical expertise of individual team members is important to ensure high performance, teams must be capable of applying and combining the unique expertise of team members to maintain safety and optimal performance. May it be an emergency team in the trauma room, paramedics treating patients after an accident or a surgical team in the operating room, teams are ubiquitous in healthcare and must work across professional, disciplinary and sectorial boundaries.
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