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BACKGROUND: Effective teamwork is crucial for safe surgery. Failures in nontechnical and teamwork skills are frequently implicated in adverse events. The Observational Teamwork Assessment for Surgery (OTAS) tool assesses teamwork of the entire team in the operating room. Empirical testing of OTAS has yet to explore the content validity of the tool.

BACKGROUND: Although effective teamwork is fundamental to patient safety in the operating room (OR), acute stress increasingly is recognized as detrimental for teamwork. This study concurrently assessed teamwork and stress levels experienced by OR team members.

METHODS: Data were collected in real time in 20 elective surgical cases. The validated Observational Teamwork Assessment for Surgery was used to assess teamwork, whereas stress was assessed using the validated State-Trait Anxiety Inventory.

OBJECTIVE: To test the construct validity of the Observational Teamwork Assessment for Surgery (OTAS) tool.

SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA: Poor teamwork in surgical teams has been implicated in adverse events to patients. The OTAS is a tool that assesses teamwork in real time for the entire surgical team. Existing empirical research on OTAS has yet to explore how expert versus novice tool users use the tool to assess teamwork in the operating room.

AIM: The aim of the study reported here was to address the need to assess and train teamwork and non-technical skills in the context of Resuscitation. Specifically, we sought to develop a tool that is feasible to use and psychometrically sound to assess team behaviours during cardiac arrest resuscitation attempts.

AIMS: This study measured the effect of aviation-style team training on 3 surgical teams from different specialties. It focused on team working and communication, particularly briefing, time-out, and debriefing, and sought to understand how improvements in team skills could be implemented in a broad range of naturalistic surgical environments to improve safety, quality, and efficiency.

INTRODUCTION: The frequency of adverse events in the operating theatre has been linked to the quality of teamwork and communication. Developing suitable measures of teamwork may play a role in reducing errors in surgery. This study reports on the development and evaluation of a method for measuring operating-theatre teamwork quality.

OBJECTIVE: Tracheal intubation in the pediatric intensive care unit is often performed in emergency situations with high risks. Simulation has been recognized as an effective methodology to train both technical and teamwork skills. Our objectives were to develop a feasible tool to evaluate team performance during tracheal intubation in the pediatric intensive care unit and to apply the tool in the clinical setting to determine whether multidisciplinary teams with a higher number of simulation-trained providers exhibit more proficient performance.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Currently available tools to measure teamwork, an essential component of primary care, are generally very resource intensive and thus cannot be administered frequently. To explore the possibility of developing a brief teamwork-assessment instrument, we first administered 29 questions about teamwork from the Practice Environment Checklist (PEC) to all members of six clinical teams in a residency outpatient practice (n=56). We found that the scale assessed a single dimension of teamwork and that a five item survey has acceptable reliability (Cronbach alpha=0.89).

BACKGROUND: Multidisciplinary teamwork is recommended for various disorders and it has been suggested that it is a way to meet the new challenges and demands facing general practitioners (GPs) in modern society. Attempts to introduce the method in primary care have failed partly due to GPs' unwillingness to participate. The aim of this study was to measure attitudes towards collaboration among GPs and district nurses (DN) and to investigate whether there is a correlation between a positive attitude toward collaboration and high self-esteem in the professional role.

This study examined the psychometric properties of an assessment tool for measuring attitudes toward physician-nurse collaboration. A survey addressing areas of responsibility, expectations, shared learning, decision making, authority, and autonomy was administered to first-year medical and nursing students. Factor analysis of the survey indicated that the survey measured four underlying constructs of shared education and collaborative relationships, caring as opposed to curing, nurse's autonomy, and physician's authority.