View article

Effectively managing patient safety and clinicians’ emotional exhaustion are important goals of healthcare organizations. Previous cross-sectional studies showed that teamwork is associated with both. However, causal relationships between all three constructs have not yet been investigated. Moreover, the role of different dimensions of teamwork in relation to emotional exhaustion and patient safety is unclear. The current study focused on the long-term development of teamwork, emotional exhaustion, and patient safety in interprofessional intensive care teams by exploring causal relationships between these constructs. A secondary objective was to disentangle the effects of interpersonal and cognitive-behavioral teamwork.

We employed a longitudinal study design. Participants were 2100 nurses and physicians working in 55 …