TeamSTEPS

As a UofL Physicians team member, we all share one mission, and that is to deliver patient-centered care with compassion and excellence. Our vision is to become the provider of choice and the leader in patient experience, clinical outcomes and team member satisfaction in the communities we serve. As an organization, we are excited to announce TeamSTEPPS as part of our patient safety awareness journey.

TeamSTEPPS will serve as a guide to improve communication and enhance patient safety in our organization by taking a proactive, prevention focused approach to quality improvement. UofL Physicians strives to have a safety culture that includes reliable processes, a commitment to sharing information and learning. A just culture that promotes transparency and encourages team members to report safety issues. A culture where words and action match the commitment to safety for patients and providers of health care services.

A TeamSTEPPS NetLearning has been developed for ALL UofL Physicians team members. All members of the Safety Committee have completed this course and are excited to roll this out to the rest of the organization.

TeamSTEPPS provides a framework for patient safety, which represents not only the patient, providers and direct caregivers, but also those who play a supportive role within UofL Physicians. TeamSTEPPS will provide ALL UofL Physicians team members with specific tools and strategies for improving communication and teamwork, increasing awareness for patient safety and promoting a just culture. No matter your role at UofL Physicians you impact the safety of our patients.

Thank you for being a part of this patient safety awareness journey! 

Safety Starts with Awareness ..... Awareness Starts with You!

What is TeamSTEPS?

• An evidence-based teamwork system.
• Designed to improve:
  • Quality
  • Safety
  • Efficiency of health care.
• Practical and adaptable.
• Provides ready-to-use materials for training and ongoing teamwork.

Evidence-Based Teamwork System
TeamSTEPPS is a teamwork system based on 20 years of experience and lessons learned from high-reliability organizations (for example, military operations, aviation, community emergency response services, nuclear power). These types of organizations have been conducting extensive research on how teams work, what makes them effective, and how to enhance their performance. This research is directly relevant to health care, because delivering effective care requires teamwork.

Designed to Improve Team Effectiveness
TeamSTEPPS has incorporated the best practices from this research into a program to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of health care by improving communication and other teamwork skills. These skills lead to important team outcomes, such as enabling the teams to:

• Adapt to changing situations
• Have a shared understanding of the care plan
• Develop positive attitudes toward and appreciate the benefits of teamwork
• Provide more safe, reliable, and efficient care

Practical and Adaptable
Designed with input from the medical community, it is an initiative that will work within the daily functioning of our organization (it is practical) and can be customized (adapted) to meet our organization's needs. For example, we could identify an appropriate teamwork tool/process to help address a known problem (from a variety of options) that will best work within a specific department and focus time on training the team to use that tool.

Ready-To-Use Materials
The TeamSTEPPS program provides materials to integrate teamwork principles into all areas of our health care system (for example, medical and support areas) so that everyone focuses on teamwork and the ongoing support needed to keep teamwork as the focus during daily work. The success of this program depends on enhancing the culture of our organization to focus on teamwork.

Why Use TeamSTEPS?

- Goal: Produce highly effective medical teams who optimize the use of information, people, and resources to achieve the best clinical outcomes.
- Teams of individuals who communicate effectively and back each other up dramatically reduce the consequences of human error.
- Team skills are not innate; they must be trained.
- Health care systems, like many high-reliability organizations, depend on the coordinated interactions of care providers working in an environment that is:

• Dynamic.
• Complex.
• High risk.
  
  

- TeamSTEPPS provides the resources to optimize team performance across our organization.
- Human factors research has shown that even highly skilled, motivated professionals are vulnerable to error due to human limitations.
- But research has also shown that:

• Teams that communicate effectively and back each other up reduce the potential for error, which results in enhanced safety and improved performance.
• For example, the Joint Commission analyzed the sentinel events that were reported to them over the last 10 years and identified communication failure as the leading root cause of sentinel events.
  
  

- TeamSTEPPS improves communication and other teamwork skills (e.g., backup behaviors) that help an organization move toward attaining this goal. This is important because teamwork is not innate; it must be learned.