Teamwork and Patient Safety in Intensive Care Units: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are recognized as a susceptible area to potential errors resulting in adverse outcomes. Healthcare professionals are multi-tasking, information-overloaded, and often with an interruptive workflow in ICUs. Such a stressful work environment poses challenges to reach a shared mental model in clinical practice, which leads to ineffective communication and reduces their awareness of potential safety risks. Despite data sources or materials supporting patient safety and team training being available, little research has been conducted to measure teamwork in clinical practice and to detect inefficient communication factors. The advent of telehealth provides an opportunity for remote video watchers to observe the entire process of patient care and related team activities. The potential application of video analyzing algorithms to video recordings can detect safety risks retrospectively. This article presents major teamwork and patient safety challenges in ICUs, and the opportunities of utilizing available data and telehealth including video recordings in future patient safety and teamwork research.