Because modern healthcare is delivered by teams, many people can be involved in diagnosing or managing a patient. Different people often learn different things from their interactions with the same patient, depending on the individual as well as the context of the conversation. It is not uncommon for medical students to learn something that the attending physician has not learned and vice versa. Interprofessional team members may also have information that others do not.
If this information is not pulled together into a shared mental model, patient care can suffer. Teamwork and communication failures are present in most medical errors that lead to death and patient injury and team training has been shown to improve patient outcomes in some settings.
One such program, TeamSTEPPS, is an evidence-based set of strategies intended to improve team performance. In this video, Tonya Martino, the Director of Team Performance for the WWAMI Institute for Simulation in Healthcare, introduces TeamSTEPPS. As we assess and manage our patients with dyspnea, we will practice developing a shared mental model, closed loop communication and SBAR.
Knowledge Check
Resources & references
A Cognitive Autopsy Approach Towards Explaining Diagnostic Failure – PMC (nih.gov)
