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Perioperative handoffs are high-risk events for miscommunications and poor care coordination, which cause patient harm. Extensive research and several interventions have sought to overcome the challenges to perioperative handoff quality and safety, but few efforts have focused on teamwork training. Evidence shows that team training decreases surgical morbidity and mortality, and there remains a significant opportunity to implement teamwork training in the perioperative environment. Current perioperative handoff interventions face significant difficulty with adherence which raises concerns about the sustainability of their impact. In this perspective article, we explain why teamwork is critical to safe and reliable perioperative handoffs and discuss implementation challenges to the five core components of teamwork training programs in the perioperative environment. We outline evidence-based best practices imperative for training success and acknowledge the obstacles to implementing those best practices. Explicitly identifying and discussing these obstacles is critical to designing and implementing teamwork training programs fit for the perioperative environment. Teamwork training will equip providers with the foundational teamwork competencies needed to effectively participate in handoffs and utilize handoff interventions. This will improve team effectiveness, adherence to current perioperative handoff interventions, and ultimately, patient safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this effort we draw from the literature on interprofessional teamwork in high reliability organizations from different fields of study, including healthcare, industrial/organizational psychology, and management. We combine this literature with our collective experience to offer five observations on future needs for the field of team science research and practice. These themes include: (1) exploration of nonclinical teams, (2) evaluation of multi-team systems in healthcare, (3) the study of dyad leadership of teams, (4) the proliferation of virtual healthcare teams, and (5) the continuing integration of organizational and team science into the study of interprofessional teams. By presenting these observations, we argue why each is critical to the overall understanding of interprofessional teamwork in healthcare and provide areas for future scholarly advancement that will inform healthcare practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: As teams are a foundational component of modern organizations, selection and training of employees to facilitate teamwork is of key importance. In this paper, we review and meta‐analyze research on the construct of team orientation. We differentiate between organizational‐, team‐, and individual‐level team orientation and discuss multilevel theory implications. A total of 39 articles comprising 210 effects were meta‐analyzed. Results indicate that team orientation is important, particularly for effective teamwork and team‐based outcomes. Specifically, at the overall level, we found significant and positive relationships with communication, coordination, cooperation, trust, shared mental models, backup behaviors, cohesion, innovation, satisfaction, leadership, and team performance. Team orientation was found to be negatively correlated with conflict. Interestingly, we found a negative relationship between team orientation and individual‐level performance. We discuss the implications of these findings and make suggestions for future work to build upon these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To provide insights for organizations that must rapidly deploy teams to remote work. Background: Modern situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, are rapidly accelerating the need for organizations to move employee teams to virtual environments, sometimes with little to no opportunities to prepare for the transition. It is likely that organizations will continually have to adapt to evolving conditions in the future. Method: This review synthesizes the literature from several sources on best practices, lessons learned, and strategies for virtual teams. Information from each article deemed relevant was then extracted and de-identified. Over 64 best practices were independently and blindly coded for relevancy for the swift deployment of virtual teams. Results: As a result of this review, tips for virtual teams undergoing rapid transition to remote work were developed. These tips are organized at the organization, team, and individual levels. They are further categorized under six overarching themes: norm setting, performance monitoring, leadership, supportive mechanisms, communication, and flexibility. Conclusion: There is a significant deficit in the literature for best practices for virtual teams for the purposes of rapid deployment, leaving it to organizations to subjectively determine what advice to adhere to. This manuscript synthesizes relevant practices and provides insights into effective virtual team rapid deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study reviews theoretical models of organizational safety culture to uncover key factors in safety culture development.Background: Research supports the important role of safety culture in organizations, but theoretical progress has been stunted by a disjointed literature base. It is currently unclear how different elements of an organizational system function to influence safety culture, limiting the practical utility of important research findings.Method: We reviewed existing models of safety culture and categorized model dimensions by the proposed function they serve in safety culture development. We advance a framework grounded in theory on organizational culture, social identity, and social learning to facilitate convergence toward a unified approach to studying and supporting safety culture.Results: Safety culture is a relatively stable social construct, gradually shaped over time by multilevel influences. We identify seven enabling factors that create conditions allowing employees to adopt safety culture values, assumptions, and norms; and four behaviors used to enact them. The consequences of these enacting behaviors provide feedback that may reinforce or revise held values, assumptions, and norms.Conclusion: This framework synthesizes information across fragmented conceptualizations to clearly depict the dynamic nature of safety culture and specific drivers of its development. We suggest that safety culture development may depend on employee learning from behavioral outcomes, conducive enabling factors, and consistency over time.Application: This framework guides efforts to understand and develop safety culture in practice and lends researchers a foundation for advancing theory on the complex, dynamic processes involved in safety culture development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First responders are on the front line of patient care and service, but research has shown that they are also on the front line of exposure to violence. Currently, there is a lack of evidence-based interventions that prepare first responders to handle violence on the job. With the increase in emergency medical services (EMS) call volume and reports of at least 57% of the EMS responders having experienced workplace violence, there is a need to develop scientifically systematic solutions to improve emergency responder safety. Using an adapted version of the hackathon method, academic scholars and practitioner conference attendees at the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup) Conference were deployed into three multidisciplinary teams to analyze the issue and develop specific solutions. These solutions offer unique interventions to improve first responder safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As health care delivery moves toward more complex, team-based systems, the topic of medical teamwork has gained considerable attention and study across disciplines. This systematic review integrates empirical research on teamwork and health care to identify broad trends. We identified and coded 1,818 relevant, English, and peer-reviewed journal articles using a teamwork processes rubric. Several themes emerged. The health care teamwork literature has grown substantially over the past 20 years. Approximately half of the studies were descriptive (rather than interventional or psychometric); the majority relied on quantitative methods. Health care teamwork was also studied in thematically distinct manners. Interpersonal processes were most commonly studied across fields. Of all disciplines, medicine focused most on transition processes, whereas those from team science centered more highly on action processes. There were also finer grained disciplinary differences in content areas of communication and collaboration. Interprofessional journals represent a potential area for interdisciplinary efforts. Implications and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]