Improving quality and safety in rural acute care – redefining teamwork and patient centeredness in distributed teams

Abstract

Rural health care systems face several challenges, such as great geographic distances between health care facilities and the professionals involved in patient care, lower volume of emergencies and less training opportunities than in urban hospitals. To provide high quality care in rural remote settings, telemedicine is a critical tool and probably the most commonly used eHealth service. There is reason to believe that simulation based teamwork training has a great potential to improve the preparedness also of rural health care teams. However, there are large knowledge gaps regarding the effect of geographically distributed acute care teams on both patient involvement and on how teamwork can be optimised and trained. Therefore, this project aims to develop recommendations for creating safer and more patient centered rural acute care. The aims of the project are to: - investigate how distributed teamwork affects patient participation compared to co-located teamwork, and to identify means for active patient participation supporting safer and more patient centered care in rural emergency settings - study how distributed teamwork in rural settings affects fundamental teamwork concepts - develop a framework for telemedicine supported teamwork in rural settings that can be used for development, training and research - explore how simulation-based teamwork training is perceived by the participants when using telemedicine to tailor such training to teamwork in the rural setting