Family Teams: A Study to Promote Team Collaboration in Family Medicine Clinics

NCT06011239 | Completed

• 1 other identifier: HUM00239209
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 614
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 5

Brief Summary

This project includes an intervention in five Michigan Medicine family medicine clinics which is designed to improve staff collaboration across different job roles.

Conditions

Patient Care Team; Psychological Well-Being; Occupational Burnout

Keywords

family medicine; team function; burnout; compassion

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (5)

• Team Development measure

  The Team Development Measure is a 31-item questionnaire designed to the domains of communication, roles and goals, cohesion, and team primacy. Each question has four response options (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree). Summary scores are transformed to a 0-100 scale to provide a score of team functioning and cohesiveness with a higher score indicating a better-functioning team. This measure has been validated in primary care settings and has strong psychometric properties.

  Months 0, 12, 18

• Team Compassion Behavior survey

  The Team Compassion Behavior survey is a 6-question instrument adapted for teams from a longer individual compassion instrument. It is scored on a 5-point scale (almost never, seldom, sometimes, often, almost always) and summed for a total range of 6-30 point, with a higher score indicating more compassionate team behavior.

  Months 0, 12, 18

• Burnout

  The study team will use the first 10 questions of the Mini Z 3.0 (the 11th question is open-ended) to measure burnout across staff in all roles. It has just minor changes from the earlier MiniZ versions and has good performance with two subscales for supportive work environment and electronic medical record (EMR) stress. Each question has a 5-scale response option. Subscale 1 (supportive work environment) sums the responses to questions 1-7 and has a range of 7-35 with a score of 28 or higher indicating a highly supportive workplace. Subscale 2 (EMR stress) sums responses to questions 8-10 and has a range of 3-15 with a score of 12 or higher indicating a workplace with manageable EMR stress.

  Months 0, 12, 18

• Satisfaction with Intervention

  There are several open-ended questions to assess what is working well with the project, what could be improved, and any other comments about the intervention. There is also a question asking how participants feel about the project (5-point scale ranging from extremely negative to extremely positive).

  Months 0, 12, 18

• Participation Effort

  This survey asks to report how much effort participants have made to help other groups in clinic and how much effort each of the other groups have made to help them. These questions have a 5-point scale (none at all, a little, a moderate amount, a lot, a great deal). These surveys also ask two open ended questions: problems with the intervention and what is not working in clinic with respect to the project and what is working well. This data will help the study team do continuous quality improvement within the clinics to ensure that the agreed-upon help is actually occurring.

  Months 0, 12, 18

Other Outcomes (1)

• Clinic Culture

  1 month

Study Arms (2)

Survey participants

EXPERIMENTAL

All participants in the study will be in a single arm, divided by clinic.

Behavioral: Team-building processes

Clinic Staff

NO INTERVENTION

"Project champions" at each clinic who are helping to implement the project.

Interventions

Team-building processes BEHAVIORAL

All staff in one of the four role groups (medical assistants (MAs); clerical/administrative staff; nursing staff; and physicians/nurse practitioners/physician assistants) will be sent an anonymous survey. The survey will ask staff to consider what help participants wish to ask for and what help participants can offer to staff in the other three roles at times when people are busy or overwhelmed. These ideas will be combined into a typed "idea list" for each role and then staff in clinics will discuss. Once these are finalized the clinics will implement these. At several points during the year, the study team will send out brief surveys. These surveys will collect the clinic and job role and ask participant to rate how much effort has been made in different ways, and if there are open-ended comments about what is or is not working. This information will be used to improve the intervention at each clinic.

Survey participants

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 18 Years+
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Age Groups: Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• Staff in the roles of medical assistant, nurse, clerical staff, or clinician (physician, nurse practitioner, and physician assistant)
• Must work in one of five family medicine clinics at the University of Michigan.

You may not qualify if:

• administrative clinic director at each site (managerial)
• Staff outside of the above roles such as a dietician, social worker, pharmacist

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Michigan: lead

Study Sites (5)

University of Michigan-Domino Farms

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48106, United States

Location

University of Michigan- Briarwood

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48108, United States

Location

Uniiversity of Michigan- Chelsea

Chelsea, Michigan, 48118, United States

Location

University of Michigan-Dexter

Dexter, Michigan, 48130, United States

Location

University of Michigan-Ypsilanti

Ypsilanti, Michigan, 48198, United States

Location

Related Publications (4)

• Stock R, Mahoney E, Carney PA. Measuring team development in clinical care settings. Fam Med. 2013 Nov-Dec;45(10):691-700.

  PMID: 24347186 BACKGROUND

• Wee EXM, Fehr R. Compassion during difficult times: Team compassion behavior, suffering, supervisory dependence, and employee voice during COVID-19. J Appl Psychol. 2021 Dec;106(12):1805-1820. doi: 10.1037/apl0001001.

  PMID: 34968091 BACKGROUND

• Pommier E, Neff KD, Toth-Kiraly I. The Development and Validation of the Compassion Scale. Assessment. 2020 Jan;27(1):21-39. doi: 10.1177/1073191119874108. Epub 2019 Sep 13.

  PMID: 31516024 BACKGROUND

• Linzer M, McLoughlin C, Poplau S, Goelz E, Brown R, Sinsky C; AMA-Hennepin Health System (HHS) burnout reduction writing team. The Mini Z Worklife and Burnout Reduction Instrument: Psychometrics and Clinical Implications. J Gen Intern Med. 2022 Aug;37(11):2876-2878. doi: 10.1007/s11606-021-07278-3. Epub 2022 Jan 19. No abstract available.

  PMID: 35048290 BACKGROUND

MeSH Terms

Conditions

Psychological Well-Being; Burnout, Professional; Burnout, Psychological

Condition Hierarchy (Ancestors)

Personal Satisfaction; Behavior; Occupational Stress; Occupational Diseases; Stress, Psychological; Behavioral Symptoms

Study Officials

• Katherine Gold, MD

  University of Michigan

  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: NON RANDOMIZED
• Masking: NONE
• Purpose: OTHER
• Intervention Model: SINGLE GROUP
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
• PI Title: Associate Professor of Family Medicine and of Obstetrics and Gynecology

Model Details: The study will recruit all staff except the clinic managers at each of five family medicine clinics within our academic family medicine department.

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: August 18, 2023
• First Posted: August 25, 2023
• Study Start: September 8, 2023
• Primary Completion: October 20, 2025
• Study Completion: October 20, 2025
• Last Updated: November 12, 2025

Record last verified: 2025-11

Data Sharing

• IPD Sharing: Will not share

Locations

US (5)