Module 4: Teamwork and Communication: Material Use Guide

Learning Objectives:

• Describe effective communication and teamwork.
• Describe why teamwork training and improved communication optimizes resident safety.
• List barriers, tools, and strategies to effective teamwork and communication.
• Describe selected teamwork and communication tools.
• Review solutions to teamwork and communication challenges.

Topic: Importance of Teamwork and Communication Among Staff
Method: During a staff meeting, show the Communication video. Facilitate a discussion of things staff noticed about staff communicating with each other. Show slides 3–6. Reinforce these concepts by asking staff to share with a partner on their left their thoughts about the facility's strengths and areas for improvement surrounding effective communications that increase safety.
Materials: Slides 3–6, Staff Communication video
Audience: All staff, including administrators and frontline staff; residents and families

Topic: Overview of TeamSTEPPS©
Method: Provide staff a handout containing the two slides during beginning of shift or safety huddle meeting. Ask them to review the content on these two slides and respond with how they imagine TeamSTEPPS© communication skills might allow improved effectiveness of staff communications such that they could potentially prevent residents from experiencing harm
Materials: Slides 7–8
Audience: All staff, including administrators and frontline staff; residents and families

Topic: Using the TeamSTEPPS© Tools
Method: Ask staff members to volunteer to create posters for the break room and bathroom that explain the TeamSTEPPS© tools. The facility safety team can assist with this education by taking each poster around the facility during breaks in resident care and discussing one tool's use by giving explanations/examples. During the staff meeting, the poster maker will explain the tool's use. Staff will be asked to share instances when they have/could have used the tool.
Materials: Slides 9–21, Communication Tools video
Audience: All staff, including administrators and frontline staff; residents and families

Topic: Communicating With Residents and Family Members
Method: Have staff sit in groups of three or four at the staff meeting. Give each group a handout showing only one of the three slides. Instruct each group to read/discuss their assigned slide. Then answer the following about their slide: How does staff currently communicate with residents and their family members? Who usually does it? When is it usually done? Why is it done? What is the goal? How could it be improved? What new process or expectation could make communication with residents and families more consistent and effective?
Materials: Slides 23–26, Communication and Engaging the Family video
Audience: All staff, including administrators and frontline staff

Topic: Addressing Challenges and Barriers
Method: Show slides 27–28. Have a night shift staff member discuss their shift's barriers to communication, and then have the group brainstorm solutions. Then do the same thing with a day shift staff member. Are the issues the same, similar, or different? How could each shift's staff optimize their ability to overcome barriers?
Materials: Slides 27–28
Audience: All staff, including administrators and frontline staff; residents and families

Topic: Communicating Adverse Effects
Method: During a staff meeting, ask staff to share a story about a patient in the facility who got harmed. How was the resident informed of the situation? Discuss how the residents responded. How did leaders and administrators respond? Show the staff slides 29–31. Ask staff about the best way to transparently inform the resident's family about what happened. What has staff seen happen in the past? How is this process improving? How can the facility safety team work with facility leaders and administrators to share information with residents/families when an event has occurred that we don't want repeated?
Materials: Slides 29-31, Communication in Action video
Audience: All staff, including administrators and frontline staff