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Improving the U.S. health care system requires simultaneous pursuit of three aims: improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita costs of health care. Preconditions for this include the enrollment of an identified population, a commitment to universality for its members, and the existence of an organization (an "integrator") that accepts responsibility for all three aims for that population.

This study reviews the literature on groups to determine the knowledge, skill, and ability (KSA) requirements for teamwork. The focus is on: (1) KSAs rather than personality traits; (2) team rather than technical KSAs; and (3) the individual rather than team level of analysis. Fourteen specific KSAs are derived. Then, the implications of these teamwork KSAs for the modification or development of human resource (HR) management systems are determined, and research issues are discussed.

BACKGROUND: This study was conducted to determine if team training using a federally sponsored team training program improves operating room (OR) performance and culture.
METHODS: The TeamSTEPPS program, a team training program designed and tested for health care applications, was provided to the OR staff. The training occurred over 2 months to all members of the OR team, including scrub technicians, nurses, certified registered nurse anesthetists, anesthesiologists, surgeons, and all anesthesiology and surgical resident staff.

This program evaluation was designed to assess whether a transdisciplinary teamwork simulation experience improves collaborative attitudes among women's health students toward the goals of reducing medical errors and improving patient outcomes. This program evaluation used a pretest-posttest comparative design to measure changes in collaborative attitudes among 35 multidisciplinary women's health students before and after atransdisciplinary simulation experience. Collaborative attitudes were measured by the Team Attitudes Questionnaire.

INTRODUCTION: The report, To Err is Human, indicated that a large number of deaths are caused by medical error. A central tenet of this report was that patient safety was not only a function of sophisticated healthcare technology and treatments, but also the degree to which healthcare professionals could perform effectively as teams. Research suggests that teamwork comprises four core skills: Leadership, Situation Monitoring, Mutual Support and Communication.

This study implemented and evaluated the adapted Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation (SBAR) tool for use on two inter-professional rehabilitation teams for the specific priority issue of falls prevention and management. SBAR has been widely studied in the literature, but rarely in the context of rehabilitation and beyond nurse-physician communication. In phase one, the adapted SBAR tool was implemented on twoteams with a high falls incidence over a six-month period.

Aims: The aim of this study was to validate a psychometric tool, the team survey, in a health care setting with a range of teams from a Large National Health Service (NHS) Trust.

Nontechnical skills relating to team functioning are vital to the effective delivery of patient care and safety. In this study, we develop a reliable behavioral marker tool for assessing nontechnical skills that are critical to the success of ward-based multidisciplinary healthcare teams. The Team Functioning Assessment Tool (TFAT) was developed and refined using a literature review, focus groups, card-sorting exercise, field observations, and final questionnaire evaluation and refinement process.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the organizational predictors of higher scores on team climate measures as an indicator of the functioning of a family health team (FHT).

DESIGN: Cross-sectional study using a mailed survey.

SETTING: Family health teams in Ontario.

PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-one of 144 consecutively approached FHTs; 628 team members were surveyed.

A short 14-item version of the Team Climate Inventory (TCI; Anderson & West, 1994) was developed and tested by using two Finnish samples of social and health care personnel (N = 1494 and N = 771). The results of LISREL and other analyses provided evidence of the four-factor structure of the short form, as well as of the internal homogeneity, reliability and normality of its scales across the two samples. Compared to the original TCI, an acceptable item coverage and predictive validity of the shortened version was demonstrated.