WHAT IS TEAMSTEPPS?
In 2013, The Journal of Patient Safety published an article by John T. James, PhD, estimating up to 400,000 deaths a year in hospitals from preventable harm. This statistic is a fourfold increase from the IOM report in 1999, reporting up 100,000 preventable deaths a year in hospitals. A major contributing factor to these errors was a breakdown in communication and teamwork. More recently, it has been reported preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US (Markary, et al).
Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS), originally developed by the Department of Defense, is an evidence-based program that can improve interprofessional collaboration and patient outcomes through better teamwork and communication.
WISH is one of a handful of nationally recognized Master Training facilities and has partnered with American Institute of Research (AIR) and American Hospital Association (AHA) as part of the funded National Implementation of TeamSTEPPS Project through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
“The TeamSTEPPS training provided me the ability to assess my current skills and refine how I approach opportunities to improve. The tools have become part of how I function in my daily work as a nurse educator. I find the TeamSTEPPS training very valuable and wish I had done it sooner! ”