AHRQ Views

Blog posts from AHRQ leaders

MAR

2016

Making Primary Care Safer with TeamSTEPPS® for Office-Based Care

By Richard Ricciardi Ph.D., N.P., Senior Nursing Advisor for AHRQ

Office-based care is the backbone of the American health care system. Every year, there are over 900 million medical office visits. At AHRQ, we develop practical tools for health care professionals to help ensure that each visit to a medical office involves the right care, delivered at the right time, by the right member of the health care team, in the right way.

That’s why AHRQ is so excited to announce the launch of Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS®) for Office-Based Care. Office-based health care teams include physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and many other team members who partner with patients. Together health care teams work to achieve the Quadruple Aim

of providing care that is patient-centered, improves population health, and that optimizes cost efficiency, while improving the work life of clinicians and staff. Office-based TeamSTEPPS seeks to strengthen team functioning and communication and enhance productive interactions between the patient and health care teams in ambulatory settings.

TeamSTEPPS is AHRQ’s proven teamwork and communication curriculum. First developed in 2006 in coordination with the Department of Defense, TeamSTEPPS includes a comprehensive set of ready-to-use materials and tools, and a training curriculum to successfully integrate teamwork principles into a variety of clinical settings. It has been used to save lives and make care safer from the military battlefield to inpatient and long-term care settings.

TeamSTEPPS for Office-Based Care brings this success directly to ambulatory settings and medical offices. It can help your practice improve in key areas such as leadership, situation monitoring, communication, and mutual support. Field tested in primary care practices to capture clinician feedback, the TeamSTEPPS for Office-Based Care curriculum includes ready-to-use PowerPoint Presentations, implementation guides, training videos, measurement tools, and recorded Web modules that cover the course materials.

As a research agency dedicated to making health care safer, higher quality, and more affordable, accessible, and equitable, we have invested in contributing to the science of teamwork and team-based care and translating the findings of that research into ready-to-use tools. TeamSTEPPS for Office-Based Care is the newest addition to the TeamSTEPPS family; AHRQ continues to support the National Implementation of TeamSTEPPS

and the TeamSTEPPSOnline

Master Trainer Course.

Patient Safety Awareness Week is an annual event that reminds us all that patient safety isn’t someone else’s job. It’s everyone’s job. All members of the health care team, in every setting of care, have a stake in making sure that patients get the safest possible care. TeamSTEPPS for Office-Based Care is just one of the many publicly available tools that AHRQ produces to make care safer every day, every time, for every patient.

Page last reviewed March 2016

Internet Citation: Making Primary Care Safer with TeamSTEPPS® for Office-Based Care. March 2016. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/news/blog/ahrqviews/making-primary-care-safer-with-teamstepps-for-office-based-care.html