The change project topic for discussing in the paper is TeamSTEPPS. The reason for this is that teamwork plays a critical role in terms of making sure that patients receive safe and efficient care services.
Context of Change
The project will take place in a healthcare center setting. The parties affected by the change initiative comprise of patients, nurses, hospital leadership, and other hospital executives.
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Literature Review
In the healthcare environment, nurses, physicians, technicians, and pharmacists among other healthcare experts should ensure they coordinate the activities that they undertake to make sure that care offered to patients is efficient and safe. Healthcare workforce undertake their tasks interdependently while at the same time sharing common goals of realizing safety and quality in care delivery. Nevertheless, whereas delivering care needs teamwork, the individuals in these teams are not offered similar training (Coburn & Gage-Croll, 2018) . They come from distinct disciplines and various educational programs.
Owing to the interdisciplinary state of the initiatives that healthcare professionals undertake and the need for cooperating, teamwork plays an essential role in ensuring safety of the patients. The mistakes that teams make are minimal as opposed to the case of individuals, particularly when the team members understand the distinct duties they are supposed to undertake together with the duties that other team members perform. Nonetheless, just undertaking training or implementing a team structure fails to make sure that a team is capable of operating effectively (King, et al., 2018) . Teamwork does not result from co-locating people together. Rather, it revolves around the willingness to coordinate, cooperate, and communicate while emphasizing on mutual goals of attaining optimal results for all kinds of patients. Teamwork does not need members to operate together permanently. However, it is maintained by the willingness for commit to shared skills, knowledge, and attitudes as opposed to permanent assignments that occur on a daily basis (AHRQ, 2018) . In this case, TeamSTEPPS serves as a key change initiative in healthcare organizations that makes it possible to realize effective teamwork in healthcare organizations.
TeamSTEPPS serves as a research program that the DoD (Department of Defense) finances within the AHRQ and TMA (TRICARE Management Activity). By utilizing a collaborative model, the DoD and AHRQ managed to bring together professionals in team training, aviation human forces, healthcare, and change management. These played a critical role in introducing vital expertise (King, et al., 2018) . The HCTCP (Healthcare Team Coordination Program) is among the most notable initiative by the DoD. The program comprises of master grainers endowed with the goal of instructing TeamSTEPPS since its formation in 2005. Every session contributes to new insights, which is introduced to the curriculum while efficient implementation strategies emerge. These make it possible to utilize the existing resources appropriately (Coburn & Gage-Croll, 2018) . The AHRQ and DoD keep evaluating the effectiveness of the program regularly together with the correlations it has with clinical process together with outcome measures.
TeamSTEPPS commenced on January 2003 after DoD and AHRQ assembled a countrywide panel of professionals on human error, human factors, and training of medical team. During the meeting, around 30 percent of the country’s top professional discussed the requirements and approaches for fostering effective healthcare teamwork. The topic addressed comprised of competency needs for medical professionals, ideal training approaches for teams, ways of measuring teamwork reliability, and the things that the healthcare profession would learn from various disciplines, such as aviation and others (Sadler, 2016) . The results led to the emergence of a roadmap that assisted in guiding the subsequent research.
A wide-ranging literature review concerning evidence-based relationship between patient safety and teamwork was carried out. It assisted in identifying practices that would lead to patient safety in distinct fields, which need testing in the healthcare environment. From the research, CRM (crew resource management) training offered promises for dealing with teamwork issues. Since the review only emphasized on CRM, a comprehensive review was required. As such, the broader teamwork discipline was assessed in line with team training (King, et al., 2018) . Since a considerable amount of the work was realized in the military, the DoD and AHRQ realized that it was possible to extend the research to healthcare.
Additionally, the DoD evaluated the prevailing training programs by the prevailing medical team with the goal of identifying any updates or changes that might be needed. The HCTCP initiative by the DoD commended offering training to medical teams in 2001. By 2003, several distinct medical team-training initiatives prevailed within the DoD. In evaluating the weaknesses and strengths of the initiatives, case study analyses were carried out in three prevailing medical team-training efforts by the DoD. These comprised of Medical Team Management, MedTeams, as well as Dynamic Outcomes Management. The distinct programs comprised of several strengths, which required the need for establishing evidence-based programs for training medical teams (AHRQ, 2018) . In this perspective, therefore, the TeamSTEPPS initiative can be considered as an ideal approach for ensuring that distinct healthcare experts can work together to make sure that patients receive safe and efficient care.
Implementation Plan
To implement the TeamSTEPPS projects, several phases would be involved, including pre-training evaluation, planning and training, and implementation and sustainment. The first phase, pre-training assessment requires the identification of openings for boosting patient safety, assessing readiness of healthcare institution for change, identification of probable barriers for change implementation, and assessing whether sufficient resources exist for ensuring that the initiative becomes successful. The second stage, planning and training would encompass all TeamSTEPPS tools and approaches in the whole organization. The strategy should target specific departments or units. The last phase, implementation and sustainment, requires making sure that openings prevail for deploying TeamSTEPPS approaches and tools, which have been practiced and taught while at the same time receiving feedback pertaining to skills and offering continued support for TeamSTEPPS principles (AHRQ, 2018) . Adopting these approaches contributes to improved care delivery in healthcare institutions.
References
AHRQ. (2018). About TeamSTEPPS®. Retrieved from https://www.ahrq.gov/teamstepps/about-teamstepps/index.html
Coburn, A. F., & Gage-Croll, Z. (2018). Improving hospital patient safety through teamwork: The use of TeamSTEPPS in critical access hospitals. Retrieved from http://www.flexmonitoring.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PolicyBrief21_TeamSTEPPS.pdf
King, H. B., Battles, J., Baker, D. P., Alonso, A., Salas, E., Webster, J., . . . Salisbury, M. (2018). TeamSTEPPS™: Team strategies and tools to enhance performance and patient safety. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43686/
Sadler, D. (2016). Team STEPPS: Team strategies and tools to enhance performance and patient safety. Retrieved from http://ortoday.com/team-stepps-team-strategies-and-tools-to-enhance-performance-and-patient-safety/
