Enhancing Patient Safety in the Pediatric Emergency Department

The fast-paced and multifaceted nature of patient care in the emergency department makes our discipline especially prone to errors and adverse events. In recent years, strategies such as formal communication and medical team training have been proposed as potential means to enhance patient safety. In many ways, practice dynamics particular to the emergency department make this setting almost ideal for implementation of these strategies. This article reviews concepts of communication and team training in medicine, including those learned from the aviation industry (known as crew resource management). Recent literature pertaining to teams and communication in medicine is reviewed.