Building effective critical care teams

Critical care is formulated and delivered by a team. Accordingly, behavioral scientific principles relevant to teams, namely psychological safety, transactive memory and leadership, apply to critical care teams. Two experts in behavioral sciences review the impact of psychological safety, transactive memory and leadership on medical team outcomes. A clinician then applies those principles to two routine critical care paradigms: daily rounds and resuscitations. Since critical care is a team endeavor, methods to maximize teamwork should be learned and mastered by critical care team members, and especially leaders.