Creating teamwork in healthcare facilities

Abstract

Across healthcare facilities in France, and around the world, better teamwork has been presented as a solution to the patient safety issue. The Hight Authority of Health (HAS) endorsed the value of teams learning to work together and created a program providing various levels of support to voluntary teams wishing to improve their teamwork. This article presents preliminary findings from a study that used this nationally sponsored program as an opportunity to study how health professionals practice teamwork. We developed interview, observational and analysis guidelines based on the Teaming framework (Edmondson, 2012) to identify five decisive dimensions of teamwork: the existence of shared representations of work; psychological safety among team members; the ability to learn from failures; spanning across team boundaries; and the presence of leaders who can facilitate the articulation of these different dimensions. This framework made it possible to observe how the teams compared on these different dimensions. Results show that teamwork was shown to be laborious. The dimensions considered necessary for effective teamwork were often absent. In addition, a variety of structural constraints highlight the limitations of policies to improve teamwork that focus only on the teams themselves.