Thomas W. Reader

There is a growing literature on the relationship between teamwork and patient outcomes in intensive care, providing new insights into the skills required for effective team performance. The purpose of this review is to consolidate the most robust findings from this research into an intensive care unit (ICU) team performance framework. Studies investigating teamwork within the ICU using PubMed, Science Direct, and Web of Knowledge databases. Studies investigating the relationship between aspects of teamwork and ICU outcomes, or studies testing factors that are found to influence team working in the ICU. Teamwork behaviors associated with patient or staff-related outcomes in the ICU were identified. Teamwork behaviors were grouped according to the team process categories of “team communication,” “team leadership,” “team coordination,” and “team decision making.” A prototype framework explaining the team performance in the ICU was developed using these categories. The purpose of the framework is to consolidate the existing ICU teamwork literature and to guide the development and testing of interventions for improving teamwork. Effective teamwork is shown as crucial for providing optimal patient care in the ICU. In particular, team leadership seems vital for guiding the way in which ICU team members interact and coordinate with others.

Poor communication in critical care teams has been frequently shown as a contributing factor to adverse events. There is now a strong emphasis on identifying the communication skills that can contribute to, or protect against, preventable medical errors. This review considers communication research recently conducted in the intensive care unit and other acute domains. Error studies in the intensive care unit have shown good communication to be crucial for ensuring patient safety. Interventions to improve communication in the intensive care unit have resulted in reduced reports of adverse events, and simulated emergency scenarios have shown effective communication to be correlated with improved technical performance. In other medical domains where communication is crucial for safety, the relationship between communication skills and error has been examined more closely, with highly detailed teamwork assessment tools being developed. Critical care teams perform many activities where effective communication is crucial for ensuring patient safety and reducing susceptibility to error. To develop valid team training and assessment tools for improving teamwork in the intensive care unit there is a requirement to better understand and identify the specific communication skills important for safety during the provision of intensive care medicine.

Patient safety research has shown poor communication among intensive care unit (ICU) nurses and doctors to be a common causal factor underlying critical incidents in intensive care. This study examines whether ICU doctors and nurses have a shared perception of interdisciplinary communication in the UK ICU. Cross-sectional survey of ICU nurses and doctors in four UK hospitals using a previously established measure of ICU interdisciplinary collaboration. A sample of 48 doctors and 136 nurses (47% response rate) from four ICUs responded to the survey. Nurses and doctors were found to have differing perceptions of interdisciplinary communication, with nurses reporting lower levels of communication openness between nurses and doctors. Compared with senior doctors, trainee doctors also reported lower levels of communication openness between doctors. A regression path analysis revealed that communication openness among ICU team members predicted the degree to which individuals reported understanding their patient care goals (^adjR² = 0.17). It also showed that perceptions of the quality of unit leadership predicted open communication. Members of ICU teams have divergent perceptions of their communication with one another. Communication openness among team members is also associated with the degree to which they understand patient care goals. It is necessary to create an atmosphere where team members feel they can communicate openly without fear of reprisal or embarrassment.

In high-risk industries such as aviation, the skills not related directly to technical expertise, but crucial for maintaining safety (e.g. teamwork), have been categorized as non-technical skills. Recently, research in anaesthesia has identified and developed a taxonomy of the non-technical skills requisite for safety in the operating theatre. Although many of the principles related to performance and safety within anaesthesia are relevant to the intensive care unit (ICU), relatively little research has been done to identify the non-technical skills required for safe practice within the ICU. This review focused upon critical incident studies in the ICU, in order to examine whether the contributory factors identified as underlying the critical incidents, were associated with the skill categories (e.g. task management, teamwork, situation awareness and decision making) outlined in the Anaesthetists' Non-technical Skills (ANTS) taxonomy. We found that a large proportion of the contributory factors underlying critical incidents could be attributed to a non-technical skill category outlined in the ANTS taxonomy. This is informative both for future critical incident reporting, and also as an indication that the ANTS taxonomy may provide a good starting point for the development of a non-technical skills taxonomy for intensive care. However, the ICU presents a range of unique challenges to practitioners working within it. It is therefore necessary to conduct further non-technical skills research, using human factors techniques such as root-cause analyses, observation of behaviour, attitudinal surveys, studies of cognition, and structured interviews to develop a better understanding of the non-technical skills important for safety within the ICU. Examples of such research highlight the utility of these techniques.