Teamwork interventions

Watching teams and teamwork quickly reveals that a group of weU intentioned individuals does not make a team and furthermore, that teamwork has to be planned and organized. In this section we will review some apparently simple interventions, which turn out to have quite profound effects. Daily goals, preoperative and post-operative checklists seem mundane, and this partly accounts for clinicians resistance to their use. However, a checklist is not a piece of paper or even a list it is a team intervention which, used well, can affect the wider team functioning, the relationships across professions and hierarchies and even the values and safety culture of the team. To my mind, the impact of these simple tools on clinical processes and patient outcome suggests that their effect can only be fully understood by appreciating their wider impact on team performance. 

O Leary et al. (2010) Structured Inter-disciplinary Rounds Six months Teaching service unit inatertiary care teaching hospital Safety Attitudes Questionnaire Teamwork culture scores higher on intervention unit (82.4%) than control unit (77.3%)... 

The power of the study to deteet a 50 per eent improvement in the number of respondents reporting positive teamwork and safety from the median value of the index institutions was calculated to be 0.77 and 0.99 respectively (a = 0.05) assuming a 50 per eent response rate to both the pre- and post-intervention questionnaires. 

This chapter is about win-win teamwork. It builds on the principles of behavior-based safety presented in Section 3, tire intervention tools from behavior-based safety detailed in Section 4, and the concepts of group belonging and interdependence discussed in Section 5. 

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