Improving TeamSTEPPS in Medical Education: A Student-Veteran Inspired Initiative to Improve Behaviors and Understand Barriers

November 14, 2018

While the call for teamwork training in medical education continues to strengthen, no clear consensus exists on the method(s) to most effectively accomplish this training. Amidst a lack of clear guidance on best training methods, institutions have found varying levels of success with attempts to teach teamwork to medical and interprofessional students. Two medical student TeamSTEPPS Master Trainers, Rick Lang and Tom Kuriakose, describe lessons learned from the Rutgers RWJMS initiative. With the support of two fellow students and core faculty champions, they led a four-year initiative to improve teamwork behaviors of medical students and understand the barriers limiting effective teamwork training at the medical school level. This webinar provides a closer look at the RWJMS TeamSTEPPS initiative - from its origins to its current form. The webinar covers the initial identification of a curricular teamwork training deficiency, lessons learned from the initial TeamSTEPPS intervention, student behavioral outcomes, and concludes by describing a proposed model for conducting teamwork training within longitudinal medical education or interprofessional graduate curriculums.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn challenges and limitations associated with attempts to teach teamwork through an ‘exposure-based’ model in academic curriculums
• Illustrate the importance of recurring teamwork barrier assessment in iterative teamwork training program improvement
• Understand how to apply lessons learned from this initiative to improve teamwork training programs at local academic institutions