Ming-Chen Class 9 Assign


Teamwork in Medical Education

 

Teamwork has become a major focus in healthcare. A healthcare system that supports effective teamwork can improve the quality of patient care and reduce workload issues that cause burnout among healthcare professionals. To develop and implement a curriculum that teaches and promotes teamwork within medical education. Medical organizations and teaching institutions must take the lead in developing and teaching team training in healthcare.

Teams must also have meaningful task interdependencies and usually task-relevant knowledge is distributed among the team members. In addition, the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for effective team performances. These team competencies allow organizations to establish the appropriate requirements for their teams and strategies to enhance teamwork and performance. Knowledge-based competencies refer to the necessity of understanding facts, concepts, relations, and underlying foundations of information that a team member must have to perform a task. Skill-based competencies are the necessary behavioural sequences and procedures needed for task performance. Attitude-based competencies refer to the affective components needed to perform the task. Teamwork is greatly affected by how team members feel about one another and the task. The effectiveness of a team’s work depends on the internal group processes: the ways in which conflicts are managed, the amount of trust between members, and the use of an appropriate leadership style.

 

Teamwork is not an automatic consequence of placing people together. Team members need training to learn how to work together and understand the professional role and responsibility of each person. Team training can be defined as a set of tools and methods that form an instructional strategy in combination with requisite competencies and training objectives. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education echoes that teamwork is a skill that needs to be taught and assessed. The AAMC issued the Medical School Objectives Project, which sets forth ‘‘the ability to communicate effectively with patients, patients’ families, colleagues, and others with whom physicians must exchange information in carrying out their responsibilities’’ as one of the core skills that students should possess prior to graduation from medical school. Team training is also currently suggested as part of a comprehensive patient safety plan published by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the regulatory agency charged with hospital accreditation in the United States and also in Taiwan too.

 

Collaboration among health professionals forms a dynamic spectrum ranging from independent parallel practice to consultation and referral to interdependent co provision of care with interdependent decision- making. The multidisciplinary team allows for each discipline to independently contribute its particular expertise to an individual patient’s care. Team members in this situation work in parallel to one another, and direct communication between disciplines is minimal except through the physician in charge. Members of the team may be of the same or different disciplines. The interdisciplinary team refers to a team whose members work together closely and communicate freely to optimize care for the patient. The team is organized around solving a common set of problems instead of being organized around a single physician. Each member of the team contributes his knowledge and skill set to augment and support the others’ contributions.

A subset of crew resource management (CRM) concepts, when applied to high-acuity situations in healthcare, is called crisis resource management. In order for these programs to be successful, organizations must acknowledge that errors occur and deal with errors in a no punitive manner in which errors are viewed as an opportunity for learning and improvement. Several studies have suggested that learning to work in an interdisciplinary milieu should occur early in the education of the healthcare professional because experience of shared learning at an early stage may better facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS). Team- STEPPS offers a flexible, evidence-based toolkit to improve patient safety through enhanced communication and other teamwork skills.

http://teamstepps.ahrq.gov/

Interprofessional education (IPE) occurs when 2 or more professions learn with, from, and about each other in order to improve collaboration and the quality of practice. IPE helps learners to look at a task from the perspective of other professions as well as their own. It enables participators to acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they could not acquire in a uniprofessional education. Teaching teamwork is increasingly relevant in medical education as many factors threaten the ability of trainees to coordinate their individual efforts to care for patients. Medical training places co-workers together for variable and short periods of time. Teams form and then disband. The practice of medicine is complex. No one individual can expect to care for a patient on her/his own, and he/her must be able to effectively interact with other disciplines and specialties to optimize care. Communication across multiple units, physicians, nurses, and others becomes vital to ensuring that accurate and complete information is available, properly exchanged, and regularly updated.

 

REFERENCES

1. Kohn L, Corrigan J, Donaldson MS. To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health Care System. Washington, DC: National Academy Press; 2000.

2. Oandasan I, Baker G, Barker K, et al. Teamwork in healthcare: promoting effective teamwork in healthcare in Canada. Available at: http://www.chsrf.ca/research themes/pdf/teamworksynthesis- report e.pdf. Accessed May 2009.

3. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Medical teamwork and patient safety. Chapter 5. Conclusions and recommendations. Available at: http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/medteam/medteam5.htm. Accessed May 2009.

4. Thompson B, Schneider V, Haidet P, et al. Team-based learning at ten medical schools: two years later. Med Educ 2007; 41: 250–257.

5. Chakraborti C, Goonyasai R, Wright S, Kern D. A systematic review of teamwork training interventions in medical student and resident education. J GenIntern Med 2008; 23: 846–853.

6. Clancy C, Tornberg D. TeamSTEPPS: assuring optimal teamwork in clinical settings. Am J Med Qual 2007; 22: 214–217.

7. Grigsby RK, Magrane D. Teams as tools for changing the culture of academic medicine. Available at: http://www.aamc.org/members/facultydev/facultyvitae/ summer08/feature.htm. Accessed May 2009.