What Do We Need to Make This Work?

• Clearly define the need

• Focus on enhancing teamwork and establishing a teamwork and safety culture

• Support from senior leadership

• Allocate sufficient resources

  • Personnel

  • Time

  • Resources

• Measure success

• Reward and reinforce teamwork

Slide Notes:

Clearly define the need

We need to identify a specific opportunity or issue that we want to work on so that we can communicate why this initiative is important throughout the organization; we need to identify “what’s in it for me” for the staff.

This need should be something that we think a teamwork solution will work for e.g., improving communication between nurses and physicians, ensuring everyone on the care team knows the plan, etc.

We need to align this initiative with other ongoing initiatives that we have (e.g., safety initiatives) so that it is not another “new program” but an integral part of achieving our vision.

Focus on enhancing teamwork and establishing a teamwork and safety culture

For this initiative to be successful, we need to establish a culture of teamwork and safety, so that it’s not just a training program that staff go to, but a new way of working together.

One of the powerful effects of this program is that it can reinvigorate our staff’s sense of pride in their profession and love of their work by providing them with tools to enhance their performance and increase patient safety.

Staff (e.g., physicians and nurses) need to be willing to work together to communicate, question each other when appropriate, and back each other up.

Senior leadership support

We need senior leaders to be involved, visible, and active in their support of teamwork.

Senior leaders need to model the teamwork behaviors and skills that we want the staff to adopt.

We should identify a champion for this effort, someone with high credibility in the organization to lead and support the effort daily.

We also need support of the leadership within the department that’s selected as the starting point for the initiative.

Allocate sufficient resources

Appropriate time, personnel, and funding to establish the program, conduct the training, and then follow through on emphasizing the importance of teamwork in our daily work.

For example, this means:

Identifying trainers and coaches.

Providing an infrastructure to support training.

Allowing time for staff to attend training (nurses, physicians, key personnel).

Providing time for coaches to meet with staff members on an ongoing basis.

This may require some creative thinking, for example:

• How do we provide the opportunity for the team to attend training and still meet our target numbers/hours?
• How do we ensure that we have time to spend in team meetings in the future?

Measure success

We’ll need to continually evaluate whether the process is achieving the outcomes we anticipated.

If we measure success, we can then publicize it to celebrate as well as further spread the buy-in for the process.

We’ll also be able to modify the process based on lessons learned along the way.

Reward and reinforce teamwork

Since we need to create a teamwork and safety culture for this to be a success, it’s important that we reward and reinforce teams for engaging in the teamwork behaviors and learning teamwork skills.

Leaders, champions, trainers, and coaches should be willing to provide ongoing feedback to others within the institution.

Successes need to be formally recognized and showcased throughout the organization.