Administrative leadership of Wayburn Health System decided to move forward with a training program to address communication between healthcare professionals within their emergency center. After a few sentinel events where errors had occurred that compromised patient safety due to miscommunication amongst healthcare team members, hospital administration decided that communication processes needed to be standardized within the emergency center during trauma resuscitations. Four hundred employees from various departments and disciplines would require training. An instructional designer was brought onto the project to ensure that training was customized to fit the specific needs of the trauma resuscitation team.
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Wayburn North Hospital was recognized as a leading Level 1 Trauma Center in the Los Angeles area. Hospitals are accredited by the American College of Surgeons and there are varying levels that a trauma center can be awarded based on the services that they are able to provide. A Level 1 Trauma Center is equipped with a variety of different specialties that include but are not limited to orthopaedics, general surgery, critical care medicine, emergency medicine, anesthesia, and cardiology that are available to provide services twenty-four hours a day (American College of Surgeons, 2012).
Teamwork has been identified as one of the critical factors that can enable hospitals to improve patient safety. Since lack of communication is often the root cause for error in healthcare (Kohn, Corrigan & Donaldson, 2000), a team-training program was developed at Wayburn North to enhance patient safety by improving the lines of communication between several departments and stakeholders within a high-risk area of the hospital. The project consisted of building a partnership between physicians from different departments, nurses, and additional ancillary staff to improve teamwork during patient resuscitation within a trauma unit.
A challenge with healthcare training is that healthcare professionals are trained in silos but are often expected to delivery training as a team. Nurses are trained with nurses, physicians are trained with physicians, and allied health professionals are trained with other allied health professionals. Very little time, if any, is provided to train nursing and medical students so that they can function together as a team (Salas, DiazGranados, Klein, Burke, Stagl, Goodwin & Halpin, 2008; Salas, DiazGranados, Weaver & King, 2008). During a patient resuscitation, a team can quickly transform from a team of two or three individuals to a team of twenty in a matter of seconds. Depending on their clinical training, each member of the team has different objectives and responsibilities related to the patient’s care. It is important that everyone communicates their observations and their plan of care with one another to ensure that everyone on the team has a good understanding of what needs to be done in order to save the patient. It is also very important that the level of noise and chaos is controlled within the team so that all necessary roles are filled and individuals are able to complete their tasks immediately.