High Performance Teams—Crucial for a Culture of Safety

Michael Leitman, MD, Professor of Surgery and Medical Education and Dean for Graduate Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discusses how important high-performance teams are to a culture of safety. While team training in healthcare was galvanized by the development of TeamSTEPPS, organizations still struggle to get all team members to buy in to this approach. Leaders have often pointed to success in other high reliability industries like aviation, the military, and nuclear power, but these models don’t often resonant with clinicians. Checklists and other tools have also become useful adjuncts in this endeavor, but there are numerous challenges in adopting these.