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Undergraduate medical and nursing education should enable the development of communication and teamworking skills and of reflective practice, which should be assessed and continued into professional practice. This study aimed to examine appropriate methods for the assessment of interprofessional learning of clinical, teamwork and communication skills for undergraduate students in Paediatrics and Children's Nursing and to involve Senior House Officers (SHOs) in this process.

In order to make comparisons between wards and explain variations in outcomes of nursing care, there is a growing need in nursing research for reliable and valid measures of the organisational features of acute hospital wards. This research developed The Ward Organisational Features Scales (WOFS); each set of six scales comprising 14 subscales which measure discrete dimensions of acute hospital wards.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the perceptions of physicians and nurses working full-time in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) regarding interdisciplinary communication.

A significant portion of health care resources are spent in intensive care units with, historically, up to two-fold variation in risk-adjusted mortality. Technological, demographic, and social forces are likely to lead to an increased volume of intensive care in the future. Thus, it is important to identify ways of more efficiently managing intensive care units and reducing the variation in patient outcomes.

BACKGROUND: Patient safety research has shown poor communication among intensive care unit (ICU) nurses and doctors to be a common causal factor underlying critical incidents in intensive care. This study examines whether ICU doctors and nurses have a shared perception of interdisciplinary communication in the UK ICU.

METHODS: Cross-sectional survey of ICU nurses and doctors in four UK hospitals using a previously established measure of ICU interdisciplinary collaboration.

BACKGROUND: There is widespread interest in measuring healthcare provider attitudes about issues relevant to patient safety (often called safety climate or safety culture). Here we report the psychometric properties, establish benchmarking data, and discuss emerging areas of research with the University of Texas Safety Attitudes Questionnaire.

In 2004, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture, a staff survey designed to help hospitals assess the culture of safety in their institutions.

OBJECTIVE: We sought to develop a reliable and valid tool for measuring teamwork among emergency medical technician (EMT) partnerships.

METHODS: We adapted existing scales and developed new items to measure components of teamwork. After recruiting a convenience sample of 39 agencies, we tested a 122-item draft survey tool (EMT-TEAMWORK). We performed a series of exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test reliability and construct validity, describing variation in domain and global scores using descriptive statistics.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether obstetric team training in a medical simulation centre improves the team performance and utilisation of appropriate medical technical skills of healthcare professionals.

DESIGN: Cluster randomised controlled trial.

SETTING: The Netherlands.

SAMPLE: The obstetric departments of 24 Dutch hospitals.

OBJECTIVE: Human factors and teamwork are major contributors to sentinel events. A major limitation to improving human factors and teamwork is the paucity of objective validated measurement tools. Our goal was to develop a brief tool that could be used to objectively evaluate teamwork in the field during short clinical team simulations and in everyday clinical care.