What Does Nursing Teamwork Look Like - Essay Example

Nursing teamwork has become increasingly important in hospitals because they are the first line of assistance to patients. The need for nurses working together was seen in many areas of the hospital. For example, the authors state that most studies were done with surgical and emergency room nurses, but research on teams has not been done with acute care facilities. The authors felt that there needed to be a specific understanding of teamwork so that nurses would be encouraged to work together because teamwork is critical to patient safety. The authors point out that hospitals still are unsure of what teamwork in nursing should look like and how it should be executed. The authors state that “Lack of clarity about the teamwork processes underlying nursing teamwork hinders the development of targeted, effective quality enhancement and patient safety initiatives” (p. 298). If teamwork is understood and there is a model that can be used to help hospitals be more effective, patient care will be enhanced, according to this study. The gap in the knowledge is that the research before this study has concentrated on surgical and emergency teams for teamwork; this study fills the gap for the study of acute care.

Significance of the Study

            The significance of this study lies in patient care initiatives. Kalisch et al. (2009) state that nurses who work totally on their own are prone to make errors with patients. As an example, nurses who work 12.5-hour shifts are prone to make at least 5% of their regular shifts, and nurses working 8-12 hours often make 2% errors on their shifts. They also state that 70% of sentinel events happen because of miscommunication between staff members. The authors substantiate the significance of the study by providing these statistics and the reader finds that this is a very important aspect of any hospital. It seems that teamwork strengthens patient care.

Purpose and Research Questions

            The purpose of this study was to measure teamwork effectiveness through the use of focus groups and the Salas conceptual framework of teamwork. They used this framework because it offered a behavioral component that they felt hospital personnel could understand. The researchers do not state a specific aim but this was the major thrust of their work.  There were no specific questions asked, but it seemed that, What constitutes a team? Was the question they were attempting to answer. They asked this question and then provided different studies that described how other researchers defined teamwork. The research question was related to the problem because the authors are defining teams. I think that the qualitative method was appropriate to this study because teams begin with people understanding what a team is and whether it is effective or not. It would seem that this question would need to be answered by talking to people about their experiences.

Literature Review

            The authors used qualitative and quantitative studies, books, and government reports (Joint Commission). The references that were used spanned between the years 1994 and 2009. Most of them were between 1994 and 2002. I would not think that this was accurate information since most of the references were older than five years. The majority of references were about teamwork and quality control. The authors did not evaluate the articles but used them to support their need to find definitions of teamwork. I thought the literature review did include information that helped the authors build a logical argument. As an example, they used information from the Joint Commission to add weight to the fact that teams work better than one nurse working alone.

Conceptual/Theoretical Framework

            The conceptual framework that the researchers explained was the concept of teamwork and the theories that other researchers used. The authors analyzed 20 years of research in the area of teamwork and found 138 teamwork models. They used the Salas conceptual framework of teamwork because it has a behavioral component and a specific definition of teamwork. They state that this model also provided a diagnostic component that provided a way for the authors to help anyone reading the study understand teamwork.  The study already had a framework that they used that came from research by some of the current authors. The results of the study validated the use of this framework for acute care nursing.