Teamwork and communication are the leading cause of medical errors and preventable adverse events. The team developed and validated the Clinical Teamwork Scale (CTS™) to measure clinical communication and teamwork behaviors in clinical care and simulated scenarios. CTS™ is a tool that can be used by frontline providers, staff, and researchers to efficiently measure clinical teamwork skills. The CTS™ contains 15 questions in 5 clinical teamwork domains. The domains queried by the CTS™ include quality of communication, situational awareness (e.g., did the provider perceive target fixation, or “tunnel vision”), and role clarity. In validation studies, the CTS™ demonstrated substantial score concordance among raters, and excellent interrater reliability. CTS™ is used in almost every continent, in over a dozen countries, and in 30 of 50 states in the US to measure clinical team performance, which is a major contributor to safety events and errors.
The CTS™ instrument is available for use. Please take a moment to fill out the following information before downloading the short form. This information is confidential and for internal use only Information will not be distributed to any third-party vendors. We appreciate knowing how the tool is useful to others.
If used, please cite:
1. Guise J-M, Deering SH, Kanki BG, Osterweil P, Li H, Mori M, et al.
Validation of a tool to measure and promote clinical teamwork.
Simulation in Healthcare. 2008;3(4):217–223.