Teamwork Training for Interdisciplinary Applications

Safe healthcare delivery in the emergency department is a team sport. Medical educators seek efficient and effective methods to teach and practice teamwork skills to all levels of interdisciplinary learners with the goal of enhancing communication, insuring smooth clinical operations, and improving patient safety. We present a new interdisciplinary, health professions teamwork curriculum, modified from TeamSTEPPS, that is efficient, effective, and can be delivered using multiple teaching modalities. This flexible curriculum structure begins with a brief didactic core designed to orient the learners to team concepts and invest them in the rationale for focusing on teamwork skills. This is followed by one of four additional instructional modalities: traditional didactic, interactive audience response didactic, low-fidelity simulation (role play), and high-fidelity patient simulation. Each of these additional modalities can be utilized singly or in combination to enhance the learners’ attitudes, knowledge, and skills in team-based behaviors. Interdisciplinary cases have been defined, piloted, modified, and deployed at two major universities across more than 400 learners. Interdisciplinary simulation scenarios range from team-based role play to high-fidelity human patient simulation. Assessment cases using standardized patients are designed for interdisciplinary applications and focus on observable team-based behaviors rather than clinical knowledge. All of these cases have accompanying assessment instruments for attitudes, knowledge, and skills. These instruments may be used for formative assessment to provide feedback to the learners and standardize the faculty's information delivery. If used in a summative manner they provide data for course completion criteria, remediation, or competency assessment.