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.

Unfortunately, this information is often not pulled together into a shared mental model. 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 and discusses two communication strategies used to optimize information sharing: closed loop communication and SBAR.

SBAR

SBAR is a way to communicate key information efficiently.

Resources & references

Teaching Critical Thinking: A Case for Instruction in Cognitive Biases to Reduce Diagnostic Errors and Improve Patient Safety – PubMed (nih.gov)

A Cognitive Autopsy Approach Towards Explaining Diagnostic Failure – PMC (nih.gov)

Review of the Basics of Cognitive Error in Emergency Medicine: Still No Easy Answers – PubMed (nih.gov)