Teamwork is an essential component of ensuring high quality, safe healthcare. This article describes findings from the Redesigning SystEms to Improve Teamwork and Quality for Hospitalized Patients (RESET) study, which evaluated the impact of complementary interventions to redesign unit-based care (unit-based physician teams, nurse-physician co-leadership, interprofessional rounds, performance reports, patient engagement) on interprofessional teamwork and patient outcomes. Findings demonstrate improved teamwork climate scores among nurses (but not physicians), but researchers did not identify a significant impact on patient outcomes.

Overdiagnosis is an emerging safety concern due to its potential to result in physical, financial, and emotional harm. Researchers surveyed 533 primary care practitioners (physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants) and asked them to estimate the probability of disease for common conditions (pneumonia, cardiac ischemia, breast cancer screening, and urinary tract infection) and the association of positive and negative test results with disease probability. Findings indicate that significant overestimation of disease among all participating practitioners – likely due to overestimates of pretest probability – may contribute to overdiagnosis and overuse.

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.

Insufficient teamwork can exacerbate communication errors and misunderstandings. This commentary explains how sensemaking can enhance communication among team members and describes strategies to promote team sensemaking.

… Journal of hospital medicine … J Hosp Med … Assessing more than 350 hours of direct …

Based on principles from high reliability organizations, huddles are increasingly being used to improve safety in hospitals. This study outlines a theoretical framework for how huddles can promote high-reliability behaviors in health care settings, mainly by accommodating communication, fostering interdisciplinary relationships, and enhancing safety culture.

… of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA … J Am Med Inform Assoc … The Health Information Technology for …