A healthy 38-year-old woman was admitted to a major medical center to deliver her first child. Although she was a low-risk patient with only mildly elevated blood pressure, her admission ended tragically when she underwent an emergency cesarean after a failed forceps delivery. Once inside the abdominal cavity, the uterus was found to have ruptured, and the placenta was in the abdomen. She delivered a stillborn fetus. After an unsuccessful attempt to repair her uterus, she received a full hysterectomy, underwent blood transfusions, and endured endless complications resulting in a 3-week hospital stay, including 18 days in intensive care. What went wrong? According to root cause analyses, lack of teamwork played a significant role. Specifically, communication was poor; there was a lack of mutual performance cross-monitoring, inadequate conflict resolution, poor situational awareness, and work overload. A major response to the tragedy was the initiation of team training at the medical center (Sachs 2005).
Safety is a fundamental patient right, though not a certainty (Knox and Simpson 2004). When patients arrive at a health care organization, they expect to leave that institution in equal or better health. Patients and their families do not expect physicians, nurses, and other hospital staff to make mistakes, or worse yet cover up as opposed to communicate errors. The publication of To Err Is Human by the Institution of Medicine (IOM) highlighted the fact that the delivery of care is not error free. The report concluded that medical errors cause up to 98,000 deaths annually. The IOM report brought national focus to this important issue and has since spawned significant research on the causes of medical errors and the effectiveness of different strategies for making health care a more reliable system (Kohn, Corrigan, and Donaldson 1999).
The IOM issued a number of recommendations designed to move health care institutions toward high reliability. HROs are institutions that operate in complex, hazardous environments making few mistakes (i.e., medical errors) over long periods of time. Recommendations related to voluntary error reporting, systems changes, safety systems design, and standard for health care professionals were presented in To Err Is Human. The IOM also pointed toward the need for enhanced teamwork. Historically physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals have functioned as discrete parts. The IOM recommended that interdisciplinary team training programs be established, based on sound principles of team management, to improve coordination and communication among health care staff (Kohn et al. 1999).
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is the lead federal agency in supporting and implementing the recommendations of the IOM in its effort to reduce medical error and improve patient safety. As part of this agenda, AHRQ established the HRO network to support patient safety leaders by providing them with a forum for learning about promising practices and identifying new and innovative ways to implement research findings. AHRQ's goal is to create high-reliability health care organizations. In support of that goal, AHRQ will launch Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) during 2006 and distribute this team training curriculum to members of the HRO network (Alonso et al. 2006).