Pediatric diabetic retinopathy telescreening.

Purpose: To describe the role of telemedicine screening for pediatric diabetic retinopathy (DR) and to identify risk factors for pediatric DR.

Methods: The medical records of a telemedicine program at a tertiary, academic medical center over 17 months were reviewed retrospectively. Patients visiting an academic pediatric endocrinology clinic who met guidelines underwent telescreening.

Standardized assessment for evaluation of team skills: validity and feasibility.

Introduction: The authors developed a Standardized Assessment for Evaluation of Team Skills (SAFE-TeamS) in which actors portray health care team members in simulated challenging teamwork scenarios. Participants are scored on scenario-specific ideal behaviors associated with assistance, conflict resolution, communication, assertion, and situation assessment. This research sought to provide evidence of the validity and feasibility of SAFE-TeamS as a tool to support the advancement of science related to team skills training.

Teamwork training with nursing and medical students: does the method matter? Results of an interinstitutional, interdisciplinary collaboration.

Objectives: The authors conducted a randomised controlled trial of four pedagogical methods commonly used to deliver teamwork training and measured the effects of each method on the acquisition of student teamwork knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

Methods: The authors recruited 203 senior nursing students and 235 fourth-year medical students (total N = 438) from two major universities for a 1-day interdisciplinary teamwork training course. All participants received a didactic lecture and then were randomly assigned to one of four educational methods didactic (control), audience response didactic, role play and human patient simulation.

Using the Communication and Teamwork Skills (CATS) Assessment to measure health care team performance.

Background: Patient safety administrators, educators, and researchers are striving to understand how best to monitor and improve team skills and determine what approaches to monitoring best suit their organizations. A behavior-based tool, based on principles of crisis resource management (CRM) in nonmedical industries, was developed to quantitatively assess communication and team skills of health care providers in a variety of real and simulated clinical settings.

The Cats Assessment: The Communication and Teamwork Skills (CATS) Assessment has been developed through rapid-cycle improvement and piloted through observation of videotaped simulated clinical scenarios, realtime surgical procedures, and multidisciplinary rounds.