Fluid teams, characterized by frequent changes in team membership, are vital in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) due to high patient acuity and the need for a wide range of specialized providers. However, many challenges can hinder effective teamwork in this setting. This article reviews the challenges related to fluid teamwork in the NICU and discusses recommendations from team science to address each challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Perioperative handoffs entail transferring responsibility for surgical patients from one specialized group or team to another. Multiteam system (MTS) theory has not yet been considered within perioperative handoff literature, even though multiple teams must work within and across the preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative settings to care for shared patients.
Methods: Using a case study from gynecological oncology, the authors demonstrate the applicability of an MTS taxonomy to the perioperative context.
As the need to tackle complex clinical and societal problems rises, researchers are increasingly taking on a translational approach. This approach, which seeks to integrate theories, methodologies, and frameworks from various disciplines across a team of researchers, places emphasis on translation of findings in order to offer practical solutions to real-world problems. While translational research leads to a number of positive outcomes, there are also a multitude of barriers to conducting effective team science, such as effective coordination and communication across the organizational, disciplinary, and even geographic boundaries of science teams.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the United States, health care teams are on the frontlines of this global crisis, often navigating harrowing conditions at work, such as a lack of personal protective equipment and staffing shortages, and distractions at home, including worries about elderly relatives or making childcare arrangements. While the nature and severity of stressors impacting health care teams are in many ways unprecedented, decades of psychological research exploring teamwork in extreme contexts can provide insights to understand and improve outcomes for teams in a crisis. This review highlights the psychological principles that apply to teams in a crisis and illustrates how psychologists can use this knowledge to improve teamwork for medical teams in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJt Comm J Qual Patient Saf
December 2020
Team training contributes to improved performance, reduced errors, and even saving lives-and it exists today because psychologists collaborated across domains to contribute their expertise. Our objective was to highlight the salient role of multidisciplinary collaboration in the success of team training, an area driven by psychologists responding to real-world problems. In this article, we deliver (a) a historical account of team training research, acknowledging critical turning points that shaped the science; (b) a synthesis of major contributions from subdisciplines of psychology; and (c) a collection of lessons learned in the science and practice of team training.
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