The Importance Of Teamwork In Health

Teamwork among patient care teams has positive effect on the quality of care delivered to patients, caregiver’s satisfaction, error reduction and safety. Given its importance, it is necessary to better understand the factors that influence the success of teamwork and the behaviors that comprise teamwork as well as the impact of teamwork of on healthcare outcomes in order to seek improvement strategies.

In healthcare, professionals are required to work in teams rather than individually to provide continuing and quality healthcare (Olupeliyawa et.al, 2009). It is recognized that teamwork is essential for patient safety and one of the most important facilitators in achieving positive cost effective outcomes

Several methods are used in teamwork assessment that categorized as self assessment, peer assessment, direct observation, measurement of team outcome, and survey of team members. The use of survey instrument is the most feasible method that can be used in medical settings (O’Leary et.al, 2011). Several survey instruments are widely used in healthcare to assess the teamwork. The Nursing Teamwork Survey (NTS) is a 33-item questionnaire used to differentiate levels of nursing teamwork; trust, team orientation, backup behavior, shared mental models and team leadership (kalsich et.al, 2010). Two tools specifically focus on inter-professional teamwork in an emergency environment; the Mayo High Performance Teamwork Scale (MayoHPTS) which rates quality, adaptability, leadership,