Tools4Teams: Research Training to Design and Implement Tools Supporting Safe Teamwork in Healthcare

There is a large body of evidence demonstrating that effective teamwork by healthcare teams is crucial to maintain safe and effective patient care in complex care contexts.

Complexity of healthcare is rapidly increasing due to technological innovation, increasing healthcare specialisation and decentralisation of care provision.

Teams urgently need innovative tools that support team interactions to augment their situation awareness of and responsiveness to complex healthcare situations.

Both in centralized acute care settings and in decentralized chronic care settings there is an urgent need to deeper understand team performance in complex situations and to apply this knowledge in the design and implementation of innovative tools in training and real-time application.

Tools4Teams aims to establish a European training network to prepare the next generation of teamwork experts to contribute to the next step in safe and effective care.

Tools4Teams brings together expertise from social and technical sciences, human centred design, education, and clinical specialties alongside non-academic partners from technological business, healthcare, and education to reach both scientific and societal impact.Tools4Teams recognizes and builds upon the transformative opportunities created by the application of behavioural sciences methodologies in healthcare and extend it with human centred design of tools as to impact upon the most challenging problems in research and delivery of safe and effective care.

Mixed-methods designs will be applied to advance the scientific knowledge on evidence-based training and tools:1. to support team interaction processes;2. to integrate patient involvement in teamwork;3. to support multiple team performance;4. to facilitate innovative training (i.e. virtual and augmented reality).This research has practical implications for healthcare as a whole and will benefit clinician teams and the patients for whom they care.