TeamSTEPPS Virtual Teams: Interactive Virtual Team Training and Practice for Health Professional Learners.

Medical errors because of communication failure are common in health care settings. Teamwork training, such as Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS), improves team performance and patient outcomes. Academic institutions seek high-quality, low-cost curricula for interprofessional education (IPE) to prepare learners for clinical experiences before and after graduation; however, most IPE curricula involve lectures, simple tabletop exercises, and in-person simulations and are not readily accessible to geographically distributed and asynchronously engaged learners.

Virtual TeamSTEPPS(®) Simulations Produce Teamwork Attitude Changes Among Health Professions Students.

Background: The majority of the estimated 400,000 or more patient deaths per year in the United States are from preventable medical errors due to poor communication. Team training programs have been established to teach teamwork skills to health professions students. However, it is often challenging to provide this training at a physical site.

Improving student interview skills: the virtual avatar as client.

Second Life (SL) virtual environment was used by nursing students to develop beginning interview skills for urological, genital, and sexual subjective assessments. Multigenerational, multicultural client scenarios were used as students collected data in the virtual environment. Videotaped interviews of community volunteers demonstrated an increased number of questions asked in these sensitive areas following the implementation of virtual experiences.