Assessing Team Leadership in Emergency Medicine: The Milestones and Beyond

Team leadership is a critical skill for emergency medicine physicians that directly affects team performance and the quality of patient care. There exists a robust body of team science research supporting team leadership conceptual models and behavioral skill sets. However, to date, this work has not been widely incorporated into health care team leadership education.

This narrative review has 3 aims: (1) to synthesize the team science literature and to translate important concepts and models to health care team leadership; (2) to describe how team leadership is currently represented in the health care literature and in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Milestones for emergency medicine; and (3) to propose a novel, evidence-based framework for the assessment of team leadership in emergency medicine.

We conducted a narrative review of the team science and health care literature. We summarized our findings and identified a list of team leadership behaviors that were then used to create a framework for team leadership assessment.

Current health care team leadership measurement tools do not incorporate evidence-based models of leadership concepts from other established domains. The emergency medicine milestones include several team leadership behaviors as part of a larger resident evaluation program. However, they do not offer a comprehensive or cohesive representation of the team leadership construct.

Despite the importance of team leadership to patient care, there is no standardized approach to team leadership assessment in emergency medicine. Based on the results of our review, we propose a novel team leadership assessment framework that is supported by the team science literature.