Reporting Complex Multidisciplinary Healthcare Team Training Interventions: Development and Validation of a Checklist

Abstract Background Multidisciplinary healthcare teamwork training is regarded as a means to improve patient safety and quality of care. However, it is increasingly characterized by highly complex and contextualized interventions, challenging scholars and practitioners in evaluating reports of such interventions effectively. Conflicting or weak evidence as to whether these complex interventions ultimately affect patient outcomes suggests the need for more comparability, reproducibility, and transparency in scientific reporting. In the absence of an existing reporting guideline, we developed a new checklist for effective reports on the planning, content and implementation design and outcomes of complex teamwork training programs.Methods The checklist was developed through pragmatically consulting existing relevant frameworks for evaluating complex interventional studies as well as related key literature on teamwork training. We followed a stepped approach in data retrieval, applying a configurative synthesis. Subsequently, the checklist’s validity and usability were tested based on a literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles describing the implementation of the widely used comprehensive TeamSTEPPS™ curriculum. We used our checklist to evaluate the reporting in the included articles based on specific selection criteria.Results The Reporting Complex Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teamwork Training (ReCoMuTe) checklist presented in this paper exists of four distinct categories, each containing components and various explicating elements: Context and preparation; Description; Execution and delivery; Mechanisms of impact. Despite its wide use across various healthcare institutions and settings and the increasing number of publications on its implementation, we found that the reporting in papers on TeamSTEPPS implementation is often inadequate.Conclusion More standardized scientific reporting on the design and content of complex teamwork training interventions, their contextualized implementation processes and outcomes, can bolster the understanding of effective intervention design, implementation, and evaluation, and can enable well-informed decision making on investments. The ReCoMuTe checklist provides an instrument for evaluating complex interventions, such as studies on TeamSTEPPS implementation, and can assist authors, reviewers, editors, and others in further contemporary research on multidisciplinary healthcare teamwork.