Team Training for Patient Safety

In the time period since the original publication of this book, the call to develop health care as the practice of expert teams, not just teams of experts, has risen to a near mandate. While communication is the only teamwork process explicitly outlined in the National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs, Joint Commission, 2011), elements of teamwork underlie nearly every other goal as well. For example, accurate and complete medication reconciliation (Goal 8) requires communication, coordination, and cooperation among multiple providers, the patient, and often their family. Achieving clinical benchmarks for care quality, such as administering prophylactic antibiotics prior to surgery, are also often inherently the product of team processes.