Team Communication in Healthcare: An Educational Perspective

Professor Walter Eppich
​Professor and Chair of RCSI SIM, the Centre for Simulation Education and Research RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dublin, Ireland
​Saturday 12th November, 13:00

While recent initiatives to prepare clinicians for team-based clinical practice emphasize interprofessional education, entrenched structures and practices remain that continue to foster intraprofessional approaches. 

These same siloes also pervade clinical practice, often characterized by stark boundaries and tribal mentalities between professions and disciplines. Unfortunately, these same boundaries impede communication pathways that are vital for safe, effective, resilient patient care. These tensions also threaten collaboration within and between teams, hampering individual and team learning. 

Developing a culture of 'team reflection' could help overcome these tensions and serve both learning and patient care. 
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In this talk, Professor Eppich will explore beliefs and behaviours that promote team reflection and team inclusiveness, such as the importance of psychological safety and perspective taking, inclusive leadership, and inclusive leader language. Finally, Professor Eppich will give practical strategies to integrate principles of team reflection and team inclusiveness into clinical education.

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With a background in paediatric emergency medicine, Professor Eppich used qualitative and mixed methods approaches to study topics related to interprofessional collaborative practice, team reflection, healthcare debriefing, and team adaption. He earned a PhD in Medical Education from Maastricht University. He has co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He collaborates with team and organisational psychologists to study team processes both in and outside healthcare.

In 2018, he travelled to Antarctica to perform ethnographic field observations and in-depth qualitative interviews to investigate how Antarctic research teams adapt to ever-changing conditions in extreme environments. His research program seeks to delineate the contribution of workplace talk and team interaction to learning and performance.