“Placing a group of individuals from different disciplines in the same room does not mean they will function as a team.” (Stock, Mahoney, & Carney, 2013)
Like health professionals from different disciplines, students in the health professions need skills for working in teams, and these skills require intentional teaching. In CIPE, we have been dreaming about how wonderful it would be if the teachers in the different health professions used a consistent framework for teaching teamwork, whether the teaching occurs in an individual program or in interprofessional education activities. We think we have found just the framework we need in the Team Development Measure for Interprofessional Education (TDM for IPE)!
The original Team Development Measure was created to assess teamwork among interprofessional teams that provide care in clinical settings. (Stock, Mahoney, & Carney, 2013) More recently, educators at the University of Colorado and Virginia Commonwealth University adapted this tool for student teams in interprofessional education. (Lockeman, Madigosky, & Hanson, 2021) This 30-item tool measures four domains of teamwork, with the values and ethics of interprofessional collaboration woven throughout the four domains.
- Role Clarity involves learning clear role definitions and expectation for the different professionals on the team.
- Communication involves communication on the team for good decision-making and problem solving.
- Cohesiveness is the social glue that binds the team’s members to form an effective team.
- Goals and Means Clarity means that team members clearly define their goals and the means to reach them.
The items in the tool provide details needed for teaching skills and providing specific feedback when observing clinical encounters. To learn more, check out the TDM for IPE video:
Janice Hanson, Professor of Medicine
Director of Education Scholarship Development
Co-Director of the Medical Education Research Unit (MERU)
Washington University School of Medicine
References
- Stock R, Mahoney E, Carney PA (2013) Measuring Team Development in Clinical Care Settings, Family Medicine, 45(10), 699-700.
- Lockeman KS, Madigosky WS, Hanson JL (2021) A multi-institutional, multi-phase quest to measure team development among students in interprofessional education. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2021 virtual meeting, April 11, 2021.