Section 2: Explanation of Mutual Support Key Concepts and Tools
This section contains explanations and illustrations to help you better understand and appreciate the importance of TeamSTEPPS mutual support concepts and tools. If you teach this content or want additional insights into how the material can be more fully learned, you may find the instructor suggestions in section 3 helpful.
Mutual Support
Mutual support is one of the four essential elements of safe, effective, and patient-centered care.
Mutual support, which is commonly referred to as "backup behavior" in the teamwork literature, is critical to team performance. Mutual support involves team members assisting one another, providing and receiving feedback on performance, and advocating assertively when patient safety is threatened.
Mutual support is essential for successful teamwork. For example, in a healthcare environment, one team member's work overload may have fatal consequences. Mutual support provides a safety net to help prevent errors, increase effectiveness, and minimize strain caused by work overload. Over time, continuous mutual support fosters team adaptability, mutual trust, and team orientation.
Mutual Support Examples
| Context | Example |
|---|---|
| Hospital | Adjust patient loads to support staff with patients needing more care. |
| Outpatient practice | Volunteer to stay later to help a colleague caring for a sick child. |
| Diagnostic accuracy | Cross-train staff and monitor workload to prevent overloads that lead to diagnostic error. |
| Patient/family | Repeat expressions of concern to other team members about unusual behaviors of a patient in their care. |
| Virtual teams | Have cameras on to allow others to interpret nonverbal cues and show that team members are fully engaged. |
| Ask remote staff to provide virtual assistance with a task to support onsite staff with paperwork or diagnoses or to monitor vital signs in an e-ICU. | |
| Long-term care | Have an experienced registered nurse offer to administer routine medications for a less experienced registered nurse who is behind in their care because of a patient whose condition was deteriorating early in the shift. |
Mutual support is:
- Derived from careful situation monitoring through the ability to anticipate patient needs, as well as other team members' needs, with accurate knowledge of their responsibilities.
- Facilitated by the communication of information.
- Achieved by providing and receiving feedback.
- Exerted through assertive and advocacy behaviors when patient safety is threatened.
- Enhanced by leaders who encourage and model mutually supportive behaviors.
Why Mutual Support Matters
- Work overload places patient safety at greater risk.
- Staff burnout and turnover increase when mutual support is lacking.
- Over time, mutual support fosters team adaptability, mutual trust, psychological safety, and team orientation.
Other Ways To Better Understand and Value Mutual Support
Mutual Support in Office-Based Care (4:10)
- Reflect on the video scenario involving mutual support. After watching the video, think about how you'd answer each question below.
- Was mutual support demonstrated in this video?
- Was this strategy effective? Why or why not?
- Did you see any other opportunities for mutual support to be demonstrated in this video?
- Is there another mutual support strategy that might have worked in this scenario?
- Have you encountered a similar situation in your team? If so, how did you resolve it?
- Use Reflective Practice
- Asking, listening, and acting are reflective practices that can help you assess how well your teams are providing mutual support and how your teams can do so more effectively.
- More information about the value of reflective practice is in the TeamSTEPPS for Diagnosis Improvement training materials at /teamstepps/diagnosis-improvement/index.html.
- Consider the scenario below:
Your clinic has a rule that patients will still be seen if they arrive within a 30-minute window of their appointment. Greg arrives 5 minutes past the window and sincerely apologizes for being late. The administrative assistant tells Greg that he will have to reschedule the appointment. The patient advocate overhears and pulls the administrative assistant aside. She agrees that Greg should be rescheduled according to the clinic’s rules but explains that he lives very far away and relies on friends and family to transport him to doctor’s visits, so all efforts should be made to see him today. The administrative assistant appreciates this information and the fact that the advocate pulled him aside to tell him. He ensures that Greg will be seen today.
- How did the administrative assistant and patient advocate use mutual support?
- Would a patient in your practice have been treated the same way that Greg was accommodated?
- How did this scenario illustrate the need to provide support to both patients and other staff members?
