Managing teams managing crises: Principles of teamwork to improve patient safety in the emergency room and beyond

Teamwork is an essential component of safety in most work environments, especially in healthcare. Significant gains toward team-based approaches to healthcare have been made, but there remains a large knowledge base on teamwork that can be tapped. It is suggested that improvement in patient safety can be made by drawing on the science of team effectiveness and specifically focusing on investigation where team share characteristics to those in healthcare (e.g. emergency medicine). This article briefly outlines some core features of the current scientific understanding of teams. The relationship between teamwork and patient safety is then discussed. Finally, a set of scientific-rooted principles are extracted from the literature, which can guide the effectiveness of teams working in healthcare contexts.