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Effective teamwork is critical to ensuring patient safety, particularly in intensive settings such as critical care. This paper describes a “hackathon” – an intensive problem-solving event commonly used in computer science designed to stimulate creative solutions – focused on the challenges encountered by rapid team formation in critical care settings (such as for cardiac resuscitation). Hackathon teams were multidisciplinary, comprised of healthcare professionals and academics with expertise in communications, psychology and organizational sciences. The paper briefly discusses the three solutions proposed, and the impacts of leveraging this approach for solving other problems specific to health care management.

Teamwork has been highlighted as a key component of patient safety that also applies to improving diagnosis. This commentary describes how the team approach to diagnosis is anchored in patient-centered care and suggests that the diagnostic team must expand beyond the focus on physicians and involve a wide range of professionals, including pathologists, allied health practitioners, and medical librarians.

Diagnostic error represents a significant source of patient harm. In this study, researchers surveyed physicians to understand how to improve the involvement of laboratory professionals in assisting with diagnostic challenges. They conclude that there may be a greater role for laboratory professionals in the diagnostic process beyond providing test results.

This evaluation of the Transforming Care at the Bedside initiative—a collaborative intended to drive engagement of bedside nurses in enhancing safety through unit-based quality improvement projects—found highly positive perceptions of the program and evidence of widespread implementation of new innovations.

Operating room briefings or time-outs are mandated by The Joint Commission as a strategy to prevent wrong-site surgery. This commentary explores the use of briefings both before and after surgery, evidence regarding their impact, and how a comprehensive unit-based safety program (CUSP) initiative designed and implemented a briefing and debriefing process.

A medication event huddle team completed more intervention projects following the implementation of a standardized electronic database for tracking assignments.

Rather than looking at rapid response team outcomes, which have been widely studied, this article examined their effect on teamwork.

This study found that nurses supported the use of simulation-based training to foster improved communication and teamwork.

This article reveals how one hospital enhanced emergency care by improving teamwork and implementing a streamlined triage system.

Improving teamwork and communication is a continued focus in the hospital setting. Targeted interventions to address noted gaps include adoption of interdisciplinary rounds, use of patient whiteboards, and structured tools such as SBAR. This study reorganized physicians into unit-based teams to evaluate the impact on nurse–physician communication. Following implementation of the new model, physicians were more likely to identify the nurse for their patients and experience increased frequency of direct communication with them. These changes also led to 42% fewer pages from nurses to physicians. While the study didn’t correlate these self-reported improvements in communication to clinical outcomes, it’s one of the first studies investigating the benefits of geographic organization as a potential safety strategy.

Through a case scenario, this commentary describes a safety huddle program and illustrates how to apply the strategy in nursing care.

This study found that use of a comprehensive patient safety program was associated with significant improvements in safety climate among 71 diverse units participating in the Keystone ICU project.

This commentary discusses the Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety (CUSP) and Translating Evidence Into Practice (TRIP) models and how they prevent error through culture of safety and teamwork improvements.

Bedside nurses reported strongly positive experiences in dealing with nurse-led rapid response teams (RRTs). The RRT nurses not only aided in patient care, but also played a significant role in educating bedside nurses.

This study describes the development and initial testing of a tool to assess teamwork during medical emergencies.

Efforts to improve the care of complex patients in intensive care units (ICUs) focus on many factors, including unit-based initiatives. This retrospective study evaluated the relationship between daily multidisciplinary rounds and 30-day mortality. Investigators discovered that the presence of daily rounds was associated with lower mortality among medical ICU patients. In addition, the survival benefits observed with intensivist staffing were in part explained by the presence of multidisciplinary care models. A related commentary [see link below] discusses this study's findings and the concept of health engineering as a systems science to study how we optimize staffing and patient outcomes in the ICU.