Teamwork Concept

     Teamwork is defined as a set of individuals contributing something towards a shared objective. Teamwork is nearly always required in health care because no one person could possibly have all of the necessary knowledge, experience, information, time, and other resources necessary to accomplish the objective. Teamwork has benefits and costs for creating patient safety. By bringing together multiple perspectives, it is possible to leverage a vast amount of knowledge in diagnosis and treatment planning, and it is also possible to increase system robustness by crosshecking each others’ work to detect erroneous assumptions, decisions, and actions. On the other hand, teamwork requires team members to effectively cooperate, coordinate, and communicate. Teamwork breakdowns can occur when distributed agents differ on how to trade off competing goals to achieve a shared objective, do not clearly define roles and responsibilities when coordinating, including failing to take advantage of critical knowledge or information held by certain team members, and failing to clearly communicate updates to a shared plan.