Teamness, burnout, job satisfaction and decision-making in the VA Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education

Background/purpose: To evaluate teamness perceptions of employees and trainees and associations between teamness and employee perceptions of burnout, satisfaction, and decision-making in the context of a clinical setting with interprofessional trainees. Methods: Seven Veterans Health Administration (VA)-funded Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education (CoEPCE) developed interprofessional ambulatory learning environments. Two hundred forty-eight trainees and 260 employees completed the Assessment for Collaborative Environments (ACE-15) scale, a measure of teamness; VA employees also answered survey questions on burnout, job satisfaction, and decision-making. Means, standard deviations, t-tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA) using Levene's test for homogeneity and Pearson's product-moment correlations were performed. Data were collected in each of two years. Results: For employees, higher teamness was correlated with lower burnout, higher satisfaction, and higher decision-making in both years. In Year 1, employee mean ACE-15 score was 46.86 (SD 7.44) and trainee mean was 50.22 (SD 5.81). In year 2, the employee mean was 47.08 (SD 6.16) and trainee mean was 50.47 (SD 6.16) (p <.01 for both years). Conclusions: We found that teamness was significantly higher in trainees than employees in both years, and that the ACE-15 was effective in discriminating between these groups. The ACE-15 is helpful in measuring teamness in a primary care education reform context, and correlates with employee improvements in burnout, satisfaction, and decision-making. This study suggests that, in a context of interprofessional learning, measuring teamness among all care team members can enhance understanding of what influences performance and satisfaction.