Should they stay or should they go now? Exploring the impact of team familiarity on interprofessional team training outcomes

Although simulation is an effective method for enhancing team competencies, it is unclear how team familiarity impacts this process. We examined how team familiarity impacted team competencies.Trainees were assigned to stable or dynamic teams to participate in three simulated cases. Situation awareness (SA) data was collected through in-scenario freezes. The recorded performances were assessed for clinical effectiveness (ClinEff) and teamwork. All data are reported on a 1-100% (100% = perfect performance) scale.Forty-six trainees (23 General Surgery; 23 Emergency Medicine) were randomized by specialty into stable (N = 8) or dynamic (N = 7) groups. Overall changes from Sim 1 to Sim3 were 12.2% (p 0.01), -1.1% (ns), and 7.1% (p 0.01) for SA, ClinEff, and Teamwork, respectively. However, improvements differed by condition, with stable teams reflecting improvements in ClinEff (15.2%; p 0.05), whereas dynamic team ClinEff improvement (8.7%) was not significant. Both groups demonstrated improvements in teamwork (stable = 9%, p 0.05; dynamic = 4.9%, p 0.05).Teams who continued to work together demonstrated increased improvements in clinical effectiveness and teamwork, while dynamic teams only demonstrated improvements in teamwork.