Effective teamwork and communication are critical parts of the design of safe systems. In this course, you’ll learn what makes an effective team through case studies from health care and elsewhere. You’ll analyze the effects of individual behavior for promoting teamwork, communication, and a culture of safety. You will learn several essential communication tools, and you will learn how to prevent common problems associated with lapses in communication during inherently risky health care situations.

Lesson 1 discusses why effective team functioning is so critical to protecting patients from harm, including common types of errors associated with ineffective teamwork and communication. You’ll learn to distinguish teams that are working effectively from those that are not.

Lesson 2 provides specific techniques teams can use to improve their communication, such as SBAR (Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation), critical language, and briefings.

Lesson 3 reviews some of the most common problems associated with miscommunication during critical transitions in health care — when responsibility for a patient is transferred between providers and/or locations — and how to prevent them.

Estimated Time of Completion: 1 hour 15 minutes

• Training Hours: 1.25