Unraveling the Team Development Measure (TDM): Better Education from Better Care

Aligning education and practice for workforce transformation and health system change requires training future health professionals to work effectively in teams in workplace settings. Demonstrating that pre-licensure interprofessional education (IPE) influences collaboration is critical for educators. Measuring team development over time can help evaluate whether IPE increases collaboration, but there is not an effective tool to assess this construct in teams of learners.

The Team Development Measure (TDM), a 31-item tool indicating the degree to which a team possesses and uses four components needed for highly effective teamwork, is validated in clinical settings and has shown initial evidence of validity in IPE settings at a single site, but has not been studied across institutions and educational programs. We will describe the first phases of a multi-institutional project to refine the items of the TDM and strengthen evidence for validity of its use in IPE. We will present findings related to content validity from an item applicability survey at one institution and evidence related to response process from student interviews at another institution.

These data indicate that some concepts related to team development in the clinical workplace are similar in classroom-based IPE settings, while others may not translate seamlessly. Creating a usable, valid, and reliable version of the TDM for classroom-based settings will allow educators to measure team formation as an important learning outcome from these IPE experiences. In addition, TDM results can be used by learners to support the process of assessing team function and defining steps to improve team performance. Understanding how team performance will be different in the workforce will help educators debrief these concepts more effectively in classroom-based IPE. Better education about teaming informed by clinical teaming constructs will promote better care by our future health professionals.

Partial funding support from: AAMC SGEA, VCU Grant #FP00007131.