Impact of Interprofessional Orientation on New Employee Attitudes Regarding Interprofessional Teamwork

Abstract

<p>Interprofessional teamwork is recognized as a major contributing factor to safe patient care and improved patient outcomes. Healthcare professionals’ attitudes impact successful teamwork. A large, not-for-profit healthcare organization in the southwestern United States conducted a new employee orientation that included content on interprofessional teamwork, and collected quality improvement data that included responses to the TeamSTEPPS® Teamwork Attitudes Questionnaire (T-TAQ). This retrospective, non-experimental, before-after, comparative study analyzed this quality improvement data to determine if there was a significant impact of the interprofessional teamwork-focused orientation on individual team member’s attitudes regarding teamwork as measured by the T-TAQ. The principles of Adult Learning Theory guided this study. The results of the paired-samples t-test (<em>N</em>= 81) showed a significant increase in mean scores between the pre-orientation T-TAQ (<em>M</em> = 4.44, <em>SD</em> = .328) and the post-orientation T-TAQ (<em>M </em>= 4.64, <em>SD</em> = .326; <em>t</em> (80) = -6.35, <em>p</em> CI: -.262 to -.137, <em>d </em>=.34). Recommendations include that healthcare organizations consider: the addition of teamwork content to their new employee orientations with the goal of improving new employee attitudes regarding teamwork, utilizing the TeamSTEPPS® tools and materials provided by the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality in the education that they provide to their staff to improve the teamwork within their organizations, use of the T-TAQ to evaluate teamwork attitudes within their organization, and evaluation of attitudes regarding teamwork prior to hire of new employees. </p>