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Understanding teamwork in rapidly deployed interprofessional teams in intensive and acute care: A systematic review of reviews

Schilling S, Armaou M, Morrison Z, Carding P, Bricknell M, Connelly V

PloS one, 2022

Abstract

The rapid increase of acute and intensive care capacities in hospitals needed during the response to COVID-19 created an urgent demand for skilled healthcare staff across the globe. To upscale capacity, many hospitals chose to increase their teams in these departments with rapidly re-deployed inter-professional healthcare personnel, many of whom had no prior experience of working in a high-risk environment and were neither prepared nor trained for work on such wards. This systematic review of reviews examines the current evidence base for successful teamwork in rapidly deployed interprofessional teams in intensive and acute care settings, by assessing systematic reviews of empirical studies to inform future deployments and support of rapidly formed clinical teams. This study identified 18 systematic reviews for further analysis. Utilising an integrative narrative synthesis process supported by thematic coding and graphical network analysis, 13 themes were found to dominate the literature on teams and teamwork in inter-professional and inter-disciplinary teams. This approach was chosen to make the selection process more transparent and enable the thematic clusters in the reviewed papers to be presented visually and codifying four factors that structure the literature on inter-professional teams (i.e., team-internal procedures and dynamics, communicative processes, organisational and team extrinsic influences on teams, and lastly patient and staff outcomes). Practically, the…

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