Using Simulation to Build High Performance Teams

If you look at healthcare organizations who are leaders in delivering safe, patient-centered care, there’s a common thread. They place a premium on creating great teams.¹ Across healthcare, these teams represent thousands of doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and others who, despite vastly different skill sets and training, come together every day, assume their roles at the patient’s bedside, and perform nothing short of miracles in giving back patients their lives.

Laerdal is honored to support many of these teams as they train today to outperform themselves tomorrow. Using simulation, these teams can push, test, and come to know themselves in ways that give them a profound edge before they encounter a real patient.

Preventable medical error in U.S. hospitals accounts for an estimated 250,000 patient deaths and over 1 million injuries annually.² The majority of these cases can be attributed to a breakdown in teamwork and communications.³ Great teams know this, and so teamwork is where they focus—not just on refining individual skills but on instilling the skills necessary to excel within teams.⁴

We thank those institutions that place a premium on creating high performance teams in healthcare. Below we share some trends and findings based on our clients’ experiences in the hopes of supporting your organization’s patient safety initiatives, 

The realities of hospital operations are that rigidly assigned teams are a rarity.⁸ Teams are often based on who’s on schedule, the nature of the case at hand, and so on. Consider this real world example: a patient suffers an obstetrics emergency. The hospital has 208 staff members that make up the 6 disciplines necessary to form the critical event team that will respond.⁹ How many team combinations are possible?

The answer is 381,000,000. That’s how many team combinations in this hospital could come together to respond to a single obstetrics emergency. 81 x 50 x 16 x 12 x 14 x 35 = 381,000,000. See the table below.

How many team combinations could come together in your organization to respond to a patient emergency? The numbers can be staggering.