Providing healthcare is a team endeavor. Teams play an important role along the full chain of patient care, ranging from ad-hoc emergency and anesthesia teams delivering immediate care to tumor boards conferring on long-term cancer treatment. Thereby, quality of patient care hinges on the successful intra- and interprofessional collaboration among healthcare professionals, and sensitive partnering with patients and their families. In particular, communication and coordination in healthcare teams have been found essential for team performance and patient safety. Yet, effective teamwork is challenging, especially in large hospitals where turnover rates are high, and for interdisciplinary and interprofessional ad-hoc teams lacking the experience of constantly working together as a team (e.g., ICU, emergency teams, obstetrics, or anesthesia). Moreover, healthcare teams deal with complex tasks, have to make risky and fast decisions under uncertainty, and to adapt quickly to changing conditions. Fostering research on how to promote effective teamwork in healthcare may thus make an important contribution to a better quality of patient care.
To promote effective teamwork in healthcare, a number of important knowledge and practice gaps need to be closed. This research topic aims to advance our understanding of determinants and mechanisms of effective teamwork in healthcare, identify useful methods for studying teams, and enlarge our repertoire of best practices of promoting teamwork in healthcare.
Therefore, we invite contributions from different perspectives that advance on ways to promote teamwork in healthcare. Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts on, but not limited to, the following topics:
• Composition of healthcare teams: What are characteristics and challenges of interprofessional and interdisciplinary teams and human-AI teams? Which role do leadership and hierarchy play?
• Team processes: Which coordination behaviors and team interaction patterns render teams successful in which environment? How do teams develop effective routines and shared mental models?
• Healthcare environment: How do context factors (e.g., organizational structure, error culture, time pressure) shape team processes and performance? How to promote adaptive team behavior? How to best design clinical work environments to support effective teamwork and safe patient care? What are possibilities and boundaries of transferring insights from adjunct or similar environments (e.g., aviation) to healthcare?
• Team performance: How to adapt theoretical models of team performance so that they account for the dynamic medical domain? What are relevant outcomes of teamwork in healthcare and how can they be measured (e.g., patient safety)?
• Team training: What are the dos and don'ts of conducting and evaluating (interprofessional) team trainings and debriefings? Which novel approaches to team training exist? Which theoretical considerations need to be made when developing team trainings?
• Methods: Which novel and state-of-the-art methods for studying healthcare teams (e.g., their interaction, communication, team processes, performance, or outcomes) exist? How to account for context factors when studying teams?
Being convinced that it requires a multi-disciplinary perspective on teamwork in order to yield theoretical advancements and provide practically relevant guidance, we welcome submissions from any discipline such as psychology, medicine, nursing science, medical education, communication science, sociology, economics, or organization science.
We welcome empirical reports, systematic reviews, methodological contributions, applied studies, commentaries and case studies.
Providing healthcare is a team endeavor. Teams play an important role along the full chain of patient care, ranging from ad-hoc emergency and anesthesia teams delivering immediate care to tumor boards conferring on long-term cancer treatment. Thereby, quality of patient care hinges on the successful intra- and interprofessional collaboration among healthcare professionals, and sensitive partnering with patients and their families. In particular, communication and coordination in healthcare teams have been found essential for team performance and patient safety. Yet, effective teamwork is challenging, especially in large hospitals where turnover rates are high, and for interdisciplinary and interprofessional ad-hoc teams lacking the experience of constantly working together as a team (e.g., ICU, emergency teams, obstetrics, or anesthesia). Moreover, healthcare teams deal with complex tasks, have to make risky and fast decisions under uncertainty, and to adapt quickly to changing conditions. Fostering research on how to promote effective teamwork in healthcare may thus make an important contribution to a better quality of patient care.
To promote effective teamwork in healthcare, a number of important knowledge and practice gaps need to be closed. This research topic aims to advance our understanding of determinants and mechanisms of effective teamwork in healthcare, identify useful methods for studying teams, and enlarge our repertoire of best practices of promoting teamwork in healthcare.
Therefore, we invite contributions from different perspectives that advance on ways to promote teamwork in healthcare. Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts on, but not limited to, the following topics:
• Composition of healthcare teams: What are characteristics and challenges of interprofessional and interdisciplinary teams and human-AI teams? Which role do leadership and hierarchy play?
• Team processes: Which coordination behaviors and team interaction patterns render teams successful in which environment? How do teams develop effective routines and shared mental models?
• Healthcare environment: How do context factors (e.g., organizational structure, error culture, time pressure) shape team processes and performance? How to promote adaptive team behavior? How to best design clinical work environments to support effective teamwork and safe patient care? What are possibilities and boundaries of transferring insights from adjunct or similar environments (e.g., aviation) to healthcare?
• Team performance: How to adapt theoretical models of team performance so that they account for the dynamic medical domain? What are relevant outcomes of teamwork in healthcare and how can they be measured (e.g., patient safety)?
• Team training: What are the dos and don'ts of conducting and evaluating (interprofessional) team trainings and debriefings? Which novel approaches to team training exist? Which theoretical considerations need to be made when developing team trainings?
• Methods: Which novel and state-of-the-art methods for studying healthcare teams (e.g., their interaction, communication, team processes, performance, or outcomes) exist? How to account for context factors when studying teams?
Being convinced that it requires a multi-disciplinary perspective on teamwork in order to yield theoretical advancements and provide practically relevant guidance, we welcome submissions from any discipline such as psychology, medicine, nursing science, medical education, communication science, sociology, economics, or organization science.
We welcome empirical reports, systematic reviews, methodological contributions, applied studies, commentaries and case studies.
