title: Assessing teamwork: a reliable five-question survey.
abstract: Currently available tools to measure teamwork, an essential component of primary care, are generally very resource intensive and thus cannot be administered frequently. To explore the possibility of developing a brief teamwork-assessment instrument, we first administered 29 questions about teamwork from the Practice Environment Checklist (PEC) to all members of six clinical teams in a residency outpatient practice (n=56). We found that the scale assessed a single dimension of teamwork and that a five item survey has acceptable reliability (Cronbach alpha=0.89). In a subsequent validation study among an expanded sample of clinic staff (n=89), we found that the five-item questionnaire could be completed in less than 3 minutes. It continued to have an acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach alpha=0.82) and that all five items had sizeable item-total correlations. The resulting short form of the PEC may be useful for frequent assessment of team function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Family Medicine, University of Rochester/Highland Family Medicine Residency Program, Rochester, NY 14620, USA. stephen_lurie@urmc.rochester.edu
authors.forename: Stephen J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Lurie
authors.forename: Stephen H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Schultz
authors.forename: Gina
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lamanna
mesh_terms: D057189:Checklist; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006801:Humans; D007396:Internship and Residency / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017145:Models, Educational; D017146:Models, Organizational; D009518:New York; D010348:Patient Care Team / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires