Measuring team performance in healthcare: Review of research and implications for patient safety

Effective team performance is important to measure in order to determine how clinicians should be trained for safe and effective patient care. Team performance is challenging to measure. In this paper, we describe different methodologies used to capture team performance metrics including clinical surveys, direct observation, and video-based analyses of real-life clinical performance. Despite much effort, the instruments reported thus far suffer from a variety of shortcomings that prevent their wide application in assessing team behaviors and performance. A consensus is needed on a conceptual model of clinical team performance that can encompass many real and simulated healthcare settings and account for interdependencies of their outcome criteria.