Early outcomes from a national Train-the-Trainer Interprofessional Team Development Program

The imperative need to train health professions faculty (educators and clinicians) to lead interprofessional education efforts and promote interprofessional team-based care is widely recognized. This need stems from a growing body of research that suggests collaboration improves patient safety and health outcomes. This short report provides an overview of a Train-the-Trainer Interprofessional Team Development Program (T3 Program) that equips faculty leaders with the skills to lead interprofessional education and interprofessional collaborative practice across the learning continuum. We also describe the history, approach, and early outcomes of this innovative program.

The teamwork structure, process, and context of a paediatric cardiac surgery team in Mongolia: A mixed-methods approach

Introduction

Effective teamwork in paediatric cardiac surgery is known to improve team performance and surgical outcomes. However, teamwork in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), including Mongolia, is understudied. We examined multiple dimensions of teamwork to inform a team‐based training programme to strengthen paediatric cardiac surgical care in Mongolia.

Methods

We used a mixed‐methods approach, combining social network analysis and in‐depth interviews with medical staff, to explore the structure, process, quality, and context of teamwork at a single medical centre. We conceptualised the team's structure based on communication frequency among the members (n = 24) and explored the process, quality, and context of teamwork via in‐depth interviews with select medical staff (n = 9).

Results

The team structure was highly dense and decentralised, but the intensive care unit nurses showed high betweenness‐centrality. In the quality and process domain of teamwork, we did not find a regular joint decision‐making process, leading to the absence of common goals among the team members. Although role assignment among the medical staff was explicit, those strictly defined roles hindered active communication about patient information and responsibility‐sharing. Most interviewees did not agree with the organisational policies that limited discussions among team members; therefore, medical staff continued to share training and work experiences with each other, leading to strong and trustworthy relationships.

Conclusion

The findings of this study underscore the importance of well‐structured and goal‐oriented communication between medical staff, as well as the management of the quality of collaboration within a team to increase teamwork effectiveness in paediatric cardiac surgery teams in LMICs.

Team‐based training interventions have been feasible and effective in low‐ and middle‐income countries.

Although ICU nurses are a central part of the paediatric cardiac surgery care team, there are no formal post‐operative or training activities that can facilitate the joint decision‐making and common goal‐sharing process.

Resource sharing, clear role assignment, and conflict resolution rules are lacking and organisational support is key to improving teamwork.

Building trust between hospital administrators and team leadership is needed.

Experiences of Pharmacy Trainees from an Interprofessional Immersion Training

Interprofessional education is essential in that it helps healthcare disciplines better utilize each other and provide team-based collaboration that improves patient care. Many pharmacy training programs struggle to implement interprofessional education. This purpose of the study was to examine the effect of a 30-h interprofessional training that included pharmacy students to determine if the training helped these students build valuable knowledge and skills while working alongside other health care professions. The interprofessional training included graduate-level trainees from pharmacy, behavioral health, nursing, and family medicine programs where the trainees worked within teams to build interprofessional education competencies based on the Interprofessional Education Collaborative core competencies. Sixteen pharmacy trainees participated in the training and completed pre- and post-test measures. Data were collected over a two-year period with participants completing the Team Skills Scale and the Interprofessional Attitudes Scale. Paired sample t-tests indicated that, after this training, pharmacy trainees showed significant increases in feeling better able to work in healthcare teams and valuing interprofessional practice.