Improving Quality Through Multidisciplinary Education

Over the second half of the last century, quality of care in anesthesia improved by leaps and bounds as a result of improved technology and pharmaceutical advances. Since that time, anesthesiology programs have been struggling to make further improvements with minimal success. Attention has been focused on the reduction of human error in patient care because it has been well established that human error is a major cause of patient morbidity andmortality. It is generally accepted that one of the key factors in human error is poor communication between health care providers. As a result, the past 50 years has seen an increase in interest regarding multidisciplinary education (MDE) for health care providers. MDE is perceived as the next means of implementing major improvements in the quality and cost-effectiveness of patient care. In this article, the authors discuss various definitions of MDE, evaluate how MDE might be implemented in clinical arenas relevant to the anesthesiologist, and describe several implementations of MDE within their hospital and the anesthesiology department. MDE has been a topic of discussion in the medical literature since the middle of the last century. A 1967 opinion piece in a psychiatric journal compared the dysfunctional relationship between doctors and nurses to a bad marriage, leading to discussions focused on the importance of teamwork. In the 1980s, MDE gained relevancy as patient care was pushed out of hospitals into community settings. At present, the increasing complexity and depth of medical training is adding a spark of urgency to the topic as medical professionals attempt to communicate about patient care. To overcome the problems stemming from superspecialization, facilities have begun