Qual Saf Health Care
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
Assessing teamwork attitudes in healthcare: development of the TeamSTEPPS teamwork attitudes questionnaire.
The report, To Err is Human, indicated that a large number of deaths are caused by medical error. A central tenet of this report was that patient safety was not only a function of sophisticated healthcare technology and treatments, but also the degree to which healthcare professionals could perform effectively as teams. Research suggests that teamwork comprises four core skills: Leadership, Situation Monitoring, Mutual Support and Communication. In healthcare, team training programmes, such as TeamSTEPPS®, are designed to improve participant knowledge of, attitudes towards, and skills in these core areas. If such training programmes are effective, changes in knowledge, attitudes and skills should be observed. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the TeamSTEPPS Teamwork Attitudes Questionnaire (T-TAQ), a measure designed to assess attitudes towards the core components of teamwork in healthcare. ⋯ The T-TAQ provides a useful, reliable and valid tool for assessing individual attitudes related to the role of teamwork in the delivery of healthcare. Issues related to its use and interpretation are discussed.
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
Medication reconciliation in the emergency department: opportunities for workflow redesign.
To examine the role of workflow redesign to improve medication reconciliation at four Washington State community hospital emergency departments. ⋯ Ideas for an optimal workflow to generate a medication list include involving patients and utilising clerical staff to a greater extent in medication information gathering, identifying and flagging patients with missing medication information, and gathering only the medication information needed to make clinical decisions in the emergency department.
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
The nature and usefulness of patient experience information in producing guidance about interventional procedures.
To evaluate the nature of patient experience input and its perceived usefulness to members of a national Advisory Committee in making decisions about the efficacy and safety of new interventional procedures. ⋯ Obtaining patient experience to inform guidance development is complex but provides generally useful supporting evidence and some new insights not available from other evidence. Further research should aim to further develop and validate different methods to obtain patient experience input. The impact of patient experience information on how the Committee decides about whether a procedure is efficacious and/or safe should be made explicit.
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
A patient-centred instrument for assessment of quality of breast cancer care: results of a pilot questionnaire.
In several breast cancer research environments, there was a need to develop a questionnaire that would (1) provide data on how breast cancer patients experience healthcare services, (2) address issues corresponding with patients' needs and expectations and (3) produce useful data for quality assessment and improvement projects aimed at breast cancer care. This article describes the first part of the quantitative process of item selection, instrument construction and optimisation based on the results of a pilot questionnaire. ⋯ In this study, the number of items to be included in the self-administered questionnaire was reduced. The resulting set of items that determines patients' perceptions on quality of breast cancer care is easy to complete and enables anonymous responses. Further research can be aimed at establishing the reliability of the current questionnaire.
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Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2010
The impact of a tele-ICU on provider attitudes about teamwork and safety climate.
To measure teamwork and safety climate in three intensive care units (ICUs) before and after remote monitoring by intensivists using telemedicine technology (tele-ICU). ⋯ Implementation of a tele-ICU was associated with improved teamwork climate and safety climate in some ICUs, especially among nurses. Providers were also more confident about patient coverage and physician accessibility, and did not report unnecessary interruptions.