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BACKGROUND: Changing teamwork climate in healthcare through a collective shift in attitudes and values may be a necessary precursor to establishing a positive teamwork culture, where innovations can be more readily embedded and sustained. A complex educational intervention was initiated across an entire UK Trust's surgical provision, and then sustained. Attitudes towards teamwork were measured longitudinally to examine if the intervention produced sustainable results.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study, conducted in 3 intensive care units (ICUs) at 1 Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, was to develop tools and procedures to measure nurse/physician communication in future studies.

Continuity of care is a core value of patients and primary care physicians, yet in graduate medical education (GME), creating effective clinical teaching environments that emphasize continuity poses challenges. In this Perspective, the authors review three dimensions of continuity for patient care-informational, longitudinal, and interpersonal-and propose analogous dimensions describing continuity for learning that address both residents learning from patient care and supervisors and interprofessional team members supporting residents' competency development.

Federal funds totaling $16 billion support 120 000 graduate medical education (GME) positions (1). However, too few physicians are trained to practice high-quality primary care that can improve outcomes and decrease costs (2).

To integrate health care professional learners into patient-centered primary care delivery models, the Department of Veterans Affairs has funded five Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education (CoEPCEs). The main goal of the CoEPCEs is to develop and test innovative structural and curricular models that foster transformation of health care training from profession-specific "silos" to interprofessional, team-based educational and care delivery models in patient-centered primary care settings.

Professionalism has typically been defined as a set of non-cognitive characteristics (such as empathy) or as a set of humanistic values and behaviors through which clinicians express a commitment to excellence and compassion (Stern, 2006).

The Interprofessional Professionalism Collaborative (IPC), convened in 2006, currently consists of 11 national organizations representing health professions programs at the doctoral entry level, and is developing a framework of "interprofessional professionalism" (IPP) around observable behaviors that illustrate what professionalism looks like in the context of interprofessional collaborations focused on patient-, client-, and family-centered care. IPC's goal is to create tools to foster and measure these behaviors in health professionals and students.

Health systems around the United States are embracing new models of primary care using interprofessional team-based approaches in pursuit of better patient outcomes, higher levels of satisfaction among patients and providers, and improved overall value. Less often discussed are the implications of new models of care for health professions education, including education for physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and other professions engaged in primary care.

BACKGROUND: Evidence that medical error is a systemic problem requiring systemic solutions continues to expand. Developing a "safety culture" is one potential strategy toward improving patient safety. A reliable and valid self-report measure of safety culture is needed that is both grounded in concrete behaviors and is positively related to patient safety.

In order to improve efficiency and collaboration in healthcare service provision, it is recommended that students engage in interprofessional education; that is, learning with, from and about professions other than one's own profession. Such endeavors are often impeded by pre-existing attitudes; therefore, self-reporting scales such as the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) have often been used in studies to gauge perspectives. The original 19-item version of the RIPLS was completed by 418 undergraduate healthcare students from a large Australian University.