A multisite study of interprofessional teamwork and collaboration on general medical services.
Teamwork is essential to providing high quality, safe healthcare. This survey of general medicine nurses, nurse assistants, and physicians at four hospitals identified significant differences in perceptions of teamwork climate and collaboration across professional categories. While a majority of physicians reported the quality of collaboration with nurses as high, less than half of nurses gave high ratings to the quality of collaboration with physicians. Future teamwork training efforts should target the discrepancy in perceived teamwork across professional categories.