Teamwork is the way people coordinate their knowledge, decisions and actions to achieve a shared goal.
It is more than putting students into groups.
Students can successfully divide an assignment into separate pieces, complete their own work and combine the pieces at the end without ever developing much teamwork capability. Professional teamwork requires team members to continually adjust what they do in response to one another and to the situation.
Effective teamwork can involve:
This distinguishes teamwork education from interprofessional education. Interprofessional education brings students from different professions together to learn with, from and about one another. Teamwork education focuses specifically on how people work effectively together to accomplish a shared task.
A team may therefore be interprofessional, but it does not need to be. Teamwork is relevant wherever students will need to coordinate with other people in future professional practice.
Teaching students through interprofessional team simulation has a moderate positive effect on teamwork ➕➕➕➕ [1]. Communication also improves ➕➕➕➕ [1]. These findings come from randomised controlled trials involving students from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, social work, nutrition and other health disciplines.
The broader teamwork literature suggests that active practice is more effective than simply teaching students about teamwork. Simulation, team reviews and workshops all improve teamwork, whereas didactic education alone produces little reliable improvement [2].
Teamwork training also appears more effective when it addresses several aspects of teamwork together, rather than focusing on a single behaviour such as communication alone [2]. This supports teaching students to coordinate planning, communication, monitoring, support and adaptation as an integrated team process.
The evidence does not establish that one particular simulation format, technology or branded teamwork framework is best. In the student trials, different forms of simulation and role-play produced benefits, and some direct comparisons found no clear advantage of one method over another.
The strongest directly applicable evidence comes from a systematic review and meta-analysis of eight randomised controlled trials involving 819 undergraduate healthcare students [1]. Students came from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, medical social work, nutrition and other health disciplines.
Seven studies contributed to the teamwork meta-analysis. Interprofessional simulation-based education produced a moderate improvement in teamwork (Hedges’ g = .41, 95% CI .25–.56) with very low heterogeneity (I² = 4.79%). The result was stable in sensitivity analysis and the authors found no evidence of publication bias.
Four studies also measured communication, producing a moderate positive effect (g = .54, 95% CI .26–.82) with moderate heterogeneity (I² = 48.27%) [1].
The review itself used a broad search, was prospectively registered, restricted inclusion to randomised controlled trials and used independent screening, extraction and risk-of-bias assessment. Some primary studies nevertheless had methodological limitations: across the eight trials, three were judged high risk of bias, three had some concerns and two were low risk.
A much larger meta-analysis of teamwork training across 51 controlled studies, 72 interventions and 8,439 participants provides supporting evidence about instructional design [2]. Teamwork training improved teamwork behaviours and team performance, with larger effects for active methods such as simulation, team reviews and workshops than for didactic teaching alone. Interventions addressing multiple teamwork dimensions also performed better than those targeting only one dimension. Because this review includes settings outside higher education and healthcare, we use it to inform teaching recommendations rather than the RIPPLE Impact rating.
An earlier review of teamwork curricula in medical students and residents similarly concluded that effective programs commonly address multiple teamwork principles rather than communication alone [3].
