Effective Strategies for Teaching Teamwork

Abstract

Teamwork is essential for health care providers, who must work together to ensure safe and effective patient care. The ability to function effectively as a team is especially important in critical care, where ad hoc teams are brought together for short-term management of crisis situations. Teamwork training has been widely implemented, but ongoing education and practice are needed to maintain and improve competency. This article reviews some of the literature on team science and provides recommendations for enhancing training to promote development of a shared mental model. Strategies such as ensuring multidisciplinary participation, clarifying team resources and goals, and creating practice scenarios can increase the effectiveness of training for critical care teams. Evaluation can provide immediate feedback on learning outcomes and may facilitate subsequent transfer of learning to the clinical setting. Interventions that improve a team’s ability to work toward a common goal can improve outcomes for critically ill patients.

Healthcare Professionals’ Perceptions of Function-Focused Care Education for Nursing Home Practitioners

“…The SMM is a widely used team training activity model that provides a similar cognition of a clinical situation, identified care plans, and works required of team members [ 39 ]. Mathieu et al (2000) [ 46 ] adapted Cannon-Bowers et al’s SMM to present four types of SMMs: team, job/task, team interaction, and equipment/technology.…”

“…Some healthcare experts have proposed that team training should focus more on a collective team process, such as a SMM [ 37 , 38 ]. The SMM is a widely used team training activity model that provides a similar cognition of a clinical situation, identified care plans, and work required of team members [ 34 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ]. The SMM is a team-based approach in which team members possess information, such as team members’ skills, knowledge, behavioral tendencies, and attitudes, that enables them to perform better across different domains [ 44 ].…”

Cooperative behavior and management of a patient care team in an oncohematology hospital service

“…In view of an oncology unit, this attention must occur in an even more special way, since the clientele requires assistance that demands excessive emotional burden; consequently, professionals tend to live in a more tasteless work environment (4) . From this perspective, especially in the care of critically ill patients, the importance of professionals to act effectively as a team (5) stands out, a fundamental aspect for quality treatment of cancer patients (6) , generating benefits for them (7) .…”

Undergraduate Project Team Satisfaction: Analysis of a Theoretically Derived Structural Model

“…Effective team project work can benefit learners in high school (Bush et al, 2017), college (Casper, 2017), graduate and professional studies (Weinstein et al, 2013), and organizational adult education training programs (Dirks, 2019). When learners are satisfied with project teams, they are more likely to perform at higher rates (Lamm et al, 2014;Weinstein et al, 2013).…”