French National Team-Training Hospital Programme (Pacte) : results from the Pilot Phase Assessment

Like many countries, the French healthcare system is faced with patient safety challenges such as an aging and fragile population, fast-paced innovation, and greater specialization of health professionals. Together, these factors increase the risk for fragmentation of care. Inspiring greater teamwork through improved communication and cooperation between health professionals – either in inpatient or outpatient care – is viewed as key in addressing this problem.

While there have been a great number of interventions to improve team communication and cooperation, few have been developed on a national level. The objective of the French National Authority for Health (HAS) was to offer this type of programme to all hospital teams in France. This programme was designed as a ready-to-use toolbox, called Pacte (for Continuous Team Work Improvement Programme), which we launched in late 2013.

A pilot phase took place from 2015 to 2017 with 50 volunteer teams. The results of the pilot phase assessment were presented in a report (only in French) and a poster (in English).