Welcome Guide for Patients and Family Caregivers
Welcome to the TeamSTEPPS® 3.0 curriculum.
TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies to Enhance Performance & Patient Safety) is a resource to equip members of healthcare teams to work effectively together to best meet the needs of patients and their family members, friends, or neighbors who care for them (hereafter referred to as "family caregivers" in this Guide).
While TeamSTEPPS tools were primarily created for healthcare workers, patients and family caregivers may find them useful as they advocate for themselves or their loved ones. While the training materials are written to train healthcare workers, some training content may be relevant to patients or their advocates on how to use TeamSTEPPS 3.0 tools or concepts.
The TeamSTEPPS 3.0 curriculum addresses the needs of 21st century patients and the healthcare workforce that partners with them. This Guide highlights key aspects of the curriculum relevant to patients and family caregivers.
What Is TeamSTEPPS?
TeamSTEPPS, an evidence-based program, is designed to optimize the performance of healthcare teams. Effective teamwork and communication are foundational to providing every patient with high-quality, safe care throughout the healthcare system. TeamSTEPPS 3.0 has been developed in consultation with experts in teamwork and team training that included patients and family caregivers. It is guided by emerging research related to teams, team performance, communication, and adult learning, as well as input from frontline providers in care settings including hospitals, long-term care facilities, and outpatient practices.
Based on this guidance, five major emphases are reflected in the current version of the curriculum.
- Patient Focus: How to involve patients and family caregivers in care processes and decision making is an important consideration for patient safety. Patients and family caregivers should be directly involved in care teams’ discussions. Examples, teaching approaches, and other resources in the curriculum are designed to reinforce this focus. The curriculum also considers additional communication and patient engagement methods, such as patient portals and telehealth tools and technology.
- Integrated TeamSTEPPS Platform: TeamSTEPPS 3.0 consolidates content from prior versions of the curriculum created for separate care settings and incorporates it into a single, integrated resource.
- Modular Course Design: TeamSTEPPS 3.0 can be taught in sessions of varying lengths. However, extended trainings can exceed attention spans or take staff away from other responsibilities for too long. A series of shorter trainings, or even a single shorter training addressing a specific need, may more effectively meet the needs of both TeamSTEPPS students and their organizations. Shorter sessions may also be easier to facilitate when using virtual or hybrid trainings.
The TeamSTEPPS 3.0 curriculum is structured to enable frontline providers, patients, and family caregivers to learn individual key concepts or tools separately without the need to cover all parts of the curriculum. Instructors are provided with guidance that will help them focus on the tools most relevant to the settings, challenges, and staff types that training participants, including frontline staff or patients and family caregivers that they partner with, are likely to encounter.
- Active Learning Strategies: The use of passive learning methods (e.g., listening to lectures) is less likely to produce sustainable changes in attitudes and behaviors of team members than active learning strategies, which today’s workforce and patient population expects. The curriculum is designed to provide a variety of options for helping to learn or teach TeamSTEPPS 3.0 using discussions, exercises, video-based simulations, and other approaches students can actively engage in. If you are reviewing materials on your own, take time to review all the learning options.
- Emerging Team Challenges and Opportunities: Technology changes such as high-speed internet, instant messaging, and telemedicine are accompanied by an evolution in the workforce and patient population, which are more diverse and multigenerational. TeamSTEPPS 3.0 focuses on maximizing patient safety and makes connections between effective teamwork and the well-being, job satisfaction, and reduced burnout of frontline care providers. The curriculum calls attention to the ways a more diverse workforce can benefit team functioning.
If you and the frontline providers you partner with respect and support others whose backgrounds, politics, ethnicity, or other characteristics differ from your own, your teams will be able to better understand and address the needs of all patients within an increasingly diverse patient population. The curriculum includes exercises and examples that incorporate newer communication technologies and can be tried out to directly experience how they affect communication with others. The team discussions include virtual teams and teams consisting of staff from multiple units or even multiple organizations that provide care to chronically ill or medically complex patients.
Why TeamSTEPPS 3.0 Matters
As a patient or family caregiver, you directly see the impact of poor communication and ineffective team leadership on your safety, organizational efficiency, and staff morale, burnout, and turnover. Material in the Introduction reviews the connections between TeamSTEPPS and these outcomes and demonstrates the value TeamSTEPPS offers to the members of your teams.
- TeamSTEPPS tools help trainees to better cope with the stressors team members will encounter and to support both patients and healthcare providers.
- The expanded uses of communication technologies and electronic health records often pose challenges for some frontline providers, patients, and family caregivers. The curriculum provides relevant technical assistance to anyone who needs help in this general area.
- Public health emergencies have affected worker safety, family and other life routines, workplace protocols, and workloads and have contributed to tensions among staff and patients with different life views. TeamSTEPPS 3.0 tools and concepts can help you learn to better understand these risks and how to constructively cope with them.
- Changes in the job market linked to public health emergencies have expanded worker shortages, increased employee turnover, and undercut workplace stability. TeamSTEPPS 3.0 can help you understand and more effectively manage challenges arising from rapid changes in teams.
- Levels of trust and mutual respect needed for effective team functioning can be threatened in teams with more diversity unless the differences are identified, directly acknowledged, and treated as an asset rather than an inconvenience.
- The expanded functionalities available in electronic health records risk an overdependence on technologies to facilitate care coordination at the expense of handoffs and other recommended practices for providing safe care to patients.
- Collectively, all these factors contribute to fatigue and burnout that create additional challenges for teams and risks for patients. TeamSTEPPS 3.0 can assist in addressing these.
How To Approach the TeamSTEPPS 3.0 Curriculum
Approaches to the TeamSTEPPS 3.0 curriculum focus on acknowledging one's own barriers to learning, embracing the positive aspects of incorporating new teamwork and communication strategies into practice. You, as the patient or family caregiver, are a member of the team.
- Acknowledge at the start that people may be stressed, distracted, and tired and that these factors can affect how well and quickly one can learn how to use TeamSTEPPS 3.0 tools.
- While reflecting on patient harms that resulted from systemic and teamwork failures can have value, consider positive experiences that highlight the value of effective teamwork.
- It is easy to attend training sessions mechanically and "complete" them without much benefit. The use of active learning methods in the curriculum is designed to foster deeper engagement in the course.
- If you are participating in a TeamSTEPPS 3.0 training, your stories of experiences with care teams can remind other participants of how effective teamwork has changed your life for the better and of how important it is.
Evidence of TeamSTEPPS's Value
The TeamSTEPPS 3.0 curriculum reflects published and gray literature reviewed as of December 2021. A summary of this literature is included in the Evidence Base section of the website, and key publications are reflected throughout the curriculum.
For updates on research related to teamwork and its components, use the AHRQ Patient Safety Network (PSNET) website, which highlights new literature on a range of safety topics, including teamwork, communication, and safety culture. Use PSNet to monitor emerging insights on these topics and incorporate them into your daily work of caring for patients.
How To Use the TeamSTEPPS 3.0 Curriculum
- The curriculum includes examples, exercises, videos, and other resources directly relevant to specific clinical settings (long-term care, office practices, rapid response systems, etc.) and to diverse types of team participants (patients, support staff, administrators, etc.).
- Several Welcome Guides are available, each focusing on a unique TeamSTEPPS audience. Other Guides are focused on the needs of TeamSTEPPS trainers, frontline providers, or administrators supporting an organization or unitwide implementation.
- The Introduction includes foundational information on why patient safety can never be taken for granted, why safety culture and effective teamwork are essential, and how TeamSTEPPS 3.0 enhances patient safety.
- The TeamSTEPPS curriculum is organized into four modules:
- Each module has three sections:
- Section 1: Overview of Key Concepts and Tools. Provides a quick overview. It can help identify information of particular interest or provide a quick review of available tools. The TeamSTEPPS Pocket Guide aligns with Section 1.
- Section 2: Explanation of Key Concepts and Tools. Provides a deeper review of the concepts and tools included in the module. This section includes textual explanations as well as alternative ways to learn about these tools and concepts through videos, examples, case studies, etc. Resources for learning are drawn from multiple clinical settings and involve a variety of team members and both in-person and virtual teams. This approach is designed to help TeamSTEPPS users identify resources directly relevant to their situations.
- Section 3: Teaching the Key Concepts and Tools. Includes instructor resources and rationales. The instructor resources provide both general guidance on approaches to teaching TeamSTEPPS effectively and specific strategies and approaches to teaching key concepts and tools in the module. They will also provide deeper insight into how tools can be used and why their use is critical.
- Implementation Resources. Includes resources that will be relevant to people responsible for implementing TeamSTEPPS 3.0 (or parts of it) in a unit or organization.
