Supporting a psychiatric hospital culture of safety.

Background: Concerns for patient safety have risen to the forefront of health care, including mental health care. Safe patient care depends, to a large extent, on high functioning teams, yet team training is lacking in basic professional training programs. To address the need for team training, one psychiatric hospital adopted the Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety program (TeamSTEPPS).

Objectives: To describe the implementation of TeamSTEPPS throughout the organization and to describe the differences in team attributes prior to and following implementation of TeamSTEPPS.

Design: Quality improvement project using a pre-post survey design.

Results: TeamSTEPPS was successfully implemented, and changes in all team attributes trended in a positive direction with 5 of 7 subscales reaching significance (p ≤ .01).

Conclusions: TeamSTEPPS provided a practical approach for our hospital to systematically weave safety throughout the culture and improve team functioning and other attributes of highly effective teams.