Standardized and virtual patient encounters are often used to develop medical and nursing students’ diagnostic reasoning. Through educational interventions including virtual patients, medical students increased their diagnostic accuracy compared to baseline and the completeness and efficiency in the differential diagnosis increased.

Morbidity and mortality conferences (MMC) serve as a way for health care teams to discuss adverse events and errors with the goal of improving patient safety. This article presents five recommendations to improve MMC: encourage culture change; allocate ample time for open communication to foster innovative thinking; take a global approach; learn from errors and near misses; and do not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk.

High reliability remains an elusive goal for health care organizations. The authors of this study posit that medical teams’ ABCs – attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions – are critical for high-reliability, enhancing team adaptation and increasing patient safety. The article outlines practical tools and educational strategies that can be leveraged by a variety of healthcare organizations to improve team-based care.

A culture of safety is a key component to successful, sustainable patient safety programs. The authors review existing models of safety culture and propose a framework which synthesizes information across fragmented concepts – including organizational culture, social identity, and social learning – to illustrate the dynamic nature and drivers of safety culture.

This article summarizes evidence-based recommendations for team-based patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic. These recommendations focus on team functioning, safety culture, and resilience. The authors discuss how individual-, team-, and organizational-level stressors, as well as work-life stressors, can affect team performance. 

This review discusses the importance of teamwork in supporting safety, psychological states driving effective safety performance, organizational- and team-level characteristics impacting safety performance, and the role of teams in safety management.

Human factors are frequently an important contributing factor to patient safety events. This review describes the role of human factors in patient safety and presents three case studies of human factors affecting care in the NICU. A PSNet Human Factors Primer on human factors expands on these concepts.

Team development is an important focus of safety improvement. This article provides an overview of team training science and highlights aviation, military, and health care failures that motivated research to understand the psychology of teams. The authors emphasize the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration and the contributions of psychologists as research partners in this work.

Medical errors are a concern across the economic spectrum worldwide. This commentary describes an educational effort to develop champions to lead patient safety, quality improvement, and infection control initiatives in health systems in low- and middle-income countries. The authors highlight the importance of contextualizing training to consider local needs and resources.

This study aimed to validate a behavioral marker as a measure of teamwork, specifically in the intensive care unit setting. Researchers found that it was difficult to establish interrater reliability for teamwork when observing behaviors and conclude that assessment of teamwork remains complex in the context of patient safety research.

Improving safety culture is an organizational challenge. This quality improvement study describes a partnership in which a large privately owned group of hospitals, postacute facilities, and outpatient clinics partnered with an academic health system to enhance safety culture and metrics. The program included an assessment of the quality at each site followed by an individual improvement plan. Each site embarked on a multimodal intervention that included leadership engagement, team training, audit and feedback, and traditional quality improvement strategies such as Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles. The authors report significant improvements across measures of patient safety such as health care–associated infections and readmissions.

Emergency departments harbor conditions that can hinder safe medication administration for pediatric patients. This policy statement identifies and prioritizes improvements such as implementing kilogram-only weight-based dosing, involving pharmacists in frontline emergency care, and utilizing computerized provider order entry and clinical decision support systems.

Research on teamwork as a key component of safe care delivery has primarily focused on the hospital setting. This commentary highlights six elements that enable development, functionality, and assessment of teamwork in the ambulatory setting.

This systematic review found that team training programs primarily focus on improving communication among providers, generally involve simulation, and usually assess efficacy with self-report. The authors conclude that team training is improving but remains suboptimal.