Resource Center

STUDY OBJECTIVE: Nontechnical skills are "the cognitive, social and personal resource skills that complement technical skills, and contribute to safe and efficient task performance." Our research team developed and evaluated the task of developing and validating a behavioral marker system for the observational assessment of emergency physicians' nontechnical skills.

INTRODUCTION: In this study designed with adequate statistical power to detect relevant training effects, investigators evaluated Crisis Resource Management (CRM) training during a simulated patient crisis. This study is guided by the Team Effectiveness Conceptual Model by Kozlowski and Ilgen.

BACKGROUND: Non-technical skills are critical for good anaesthetic practice but are not addressed explicitly in normal training. Realization of the need to train and assess these skills is growing, but these activities must be based on properly developed skills frameworks and validated measurement tools. A prototype behavioural marker system was developed using human factors research techniques. The aim of this study was to conduct an experimental evaluation to establish its basic psychometric properties and usability.

The perceived relationship between primary care physician compensation and utilization of medical services in medical groups affiliated with one or more among six managed care organizations in the state of Washington was examined. Representatives from 67 medical group practices completed a survey designed to determine the organizational arrangements and norms that influence primary care practice and to provide information on how groups translate the payments they receive from health plans into individual physician compensation.

CONTEXT: Growth of at-risk managed care contracts between health plans and medical groups has been well documented, but less is known about the nature of financial incentives within those medical groups or their effects on health care utilization.

OBJECTIVE: To test whether utilization and cost of health services per enrollee were influenced independently by the compensation method of the enrollee's primary care physician.

In recent years employers in health care organizations have been recognizing the need for nurses to enter the workforce with a set of informatics competencies. Numerous nursing informatics programs have been established worldwide. The challenge becomes to explore innovative tools that will equip nurses with the appropriate skills to utilize information technology to improve health care quality and patient safety and redesign health care services.

Through multiyear grants awarded by the Macy and Hearst Foundations, the Macy Interprofessional Collaborative is in year two of developing a simulation-based, team training program. The program's overall goal is to improve the delivery of safe, high quality care by increasing interprofessional team communication. The training will be validated and incorporated into existing, credit-based curricula in health sciences schools and will include both a faculty development component and an exportable web-based toolkit for adaptation of the training at other health science institutions.

This study describes nursing faculty's use, knowledge of, and training needs associated with distance learning, simulation, telehealth, and informatics tools in nursing education and practice. Web-based surveys were completed by 193 faculty members from nursing schools in the western United States. More than half of the respondents were frequent users of distance learning and informatics tools. Approximately 66% of faculty reported they were competent with distance learning and informatics tools.

There is a pressing need to redesign health professions education and integrate an interprofessional and systems approach into training. At the core of interprofessional education (IPE) are creating training synergies across healthcare professions and equipping learners with the collaborative skills required for today's complex healthcare environment. Educators are increasingly experimenting with new IPE models, but best practices for translating IPE into interprofessional practice and team-based care are not well defined.

BACKGROUND: Communication failures in healthcare teams are associated with medical errors and negative health outcomes. These findings have increased emphasis on training future health professionals to work effectively within teams. The Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) communication training model, widely employed to train healthcare teams, has been less commonly used to train student interprofessional teams.