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The role of leadership in healthcare
Components of nursing teamwork
Components of nursing teamwork
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Patient safety depends on collaboration among healthcare professionals and their ability to work as a team. Thus, it is no surprise the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project included teamwork and collaboration as core competencies to ensure patients receive high-quality care (QSEN, 2018). The inability of healthcare professionals to collaborate and work together results in poor patient outcomes, duplicate therapies, higher cost of care, and decreased patient satisfaction. In fact, the Joint Commission found 70% of major medical errors to be the result of ineffective collaboration among healthcare professionals. Therefore, it is imperative every leader in the healthcare system to promote the cultivation of these skills to ensure patients receive high-quality care.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the current issues associated with teamwork and collaboration in healthcare. In addition, this paper will
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Conflict can arise from a variety of means, within someone, between two people, or a group of people (Disch, 2017). However, if conflict is unresolved, it can breakdown communication, decrease team performance, create a toxic work environment, and ultimately decrease patient’s quality of care (Disch, 2017; Johansen, 2012). A common, yet ineffective resolution to conflict in healthcare is avoidance. This is most commonly seen between a physician and a nurse, when the nurse hesitates to question a physician, as he/she holds the “authority” (Disch, 2017). Although, if the conflict is not properly addressed, the avoidance behavior will create added stress on the nurse and potentially place the patient(s) at harm (Johansen, 2012). The Joint Commission published a Sentinel Event Alert in 2008, alerting the healthcare community that poor communication, ineffective teamwork, and poor management skills are top contributors to sentinel events (Joint Commission,
Nurses should foster collaborative planning to provide safe, high-quality, patient-centered health care. As nurses, we probably know the patients the best since we spend much more time with them than any other members of the care team. We are the liaison between the patient and the rest of the care team. We need to identify a potential problem or issue, and bring it to the attention of the whole care team. We should facilitate mutual trust, respect, shared decision-making, and open communication among all relevant persons in the care of the patients. With the collaborative support of the whole care team, the patients are in a much better position and are more likely to make an informed and deliberate decision. Besides, the collaboration among the care team can facilitate communication among the care providers, and provide a channel for the care providers to vent their stress caused by the ethical dilemmas that they encounter in work. The support from peers is very important for care providers to maintain their emotional and psychological
Nurses are key components in health care. Their role in today’s healthcare system goes beyond bedside care, making them the last line of defense to prevent negative patient outcomes (Sherwood & Zomorodi, 2014). As part of the interdisciplinary team, nurses have the responsibility to provide the safest care while maintaining quality. In order to meet this two healthcare system demands, the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project defined six competencies to be used as a framework for future and current nurses (Sherwood & Zomorodi, 2014). These competencies cover all areas of nursing practice: patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, quality
It is obvious that a great deal of interprofessional research has been aimed to educate practitioners and nurses over the past decade for interprofessional practice (Orchard, King, Khalil & Beezina, 2012). The Institute of Medicine (IOM) “The Future of Nursing Leading Change, Advancing Health” (2010) recommend that private and public organizations, nursing programs and associations increase opportunities for nurses to lead and manage collaborative teams. Health care reform has created a shift in the healthcare delivery to place more emphasis on interprofessional health care teams (Sinfield, Donoghue, Horobi & Anderson, 2012). New implications are directed towards continuing education for health care workers to understand the meaning of interprofessional collaboration to support the changes in collaborative practice to improve patient outcomes (Orchard et.al, 2012). Encouraging health care professional to collaborate as a team more effectively may seem as the answer to improve the quality of care, but ineffective communication from team members to collaborate on the care needs often attributed to patient safety issues. Consequently, even when professional collaborative teams work together, there is no means to validate and measure the impact on continuing education for nurses about interprofessional collaborative practice (Sinfield, et al., 2012).
To attain this goal, nurses must work in collaboration with other members of the health care team. To improve efficiency, the health care environment must foster the development of collaborative relations among health care professionals. Trust, open communication, commitment, and shared goals must be present to support collaborative relations and effective teamwork. Health care organizations continue to place a greater demand on health care professionals while often working with limited resources. In a recent study focused on determining if there was a current or impending shortage of nurses in care settings throughout the United States, 81% of the 178 hospitals sampled indicated they have or are an... ...
In today’s health care organizations, fewer and fewer individuals are working as solo practitioners ; instead, health care is increasingly delivered through teamwork, and teams are a vital component in health care organizations(McConnell,2006). Bauer and Erdogen (2009) define a team as a “cohesive coalition of people working together to achieve mutual goals”. (p.213). According to McConnell (2006) , teams are united by a shared purpose , regardless of the team’s type, composition, degree of performance, or reason for being. In health care organizations, teams are utilized by leaders to address problems and perform tasks. McConnell (2006) states that teams can benefit the organization because they provide greater expertise, enhance morale, improve personnel retention, increase flexibility, and create synergy in the workplace..
Working in the health care setting, teamwork and collaboration are used frequently to insure that everything runs correctly and efficiently. According to qsen.org, teamwork and collaboration consists of functioning effectively within nursing and inter-professional teams, fostering open communication, mutual respect, and shared decision-making to achieve quality patient care. While assessing the patient a nurse can come into contact and work with many different individuals. These can include other nurses, doctors, therapists, and family
Professional collaboration is an important aspect regarding patient safety in the medical field. This is a time when different kinds off professionals collaborate with one another about a patient’s health status and condition. “Specifically, Interprofessionality is a process by which professionals reflect on and develop ways of practicing that provides an integrated and cohesive answer to the needs of the client/family/population…(involving) continuous interaction and knowledge sharing between professionals” (Black, 2014). The collaboration of different professionals allow for a better decision to be made towards the patient’s health outcomes.
Cultivating teamwork is vital in the fast-moving pace of the Emergency Department. One of the most important ways to cultivate this process is through developing a plan of communication with the team. According to L.J. Hood, communication is “…the dynamic interaction between two or more persons in which ideas, goals, beliefs and values, feelings, and feelings about feelings are exchanged. Even very brief communication exchanges may change all involved parties” (Hood, 2014, P.81). In many scenarios some nurses and staff members are unwilling to be those team players that are needed in a busy nursing unit, and many times nurses and staff will not communicate professionally at all. In these situations, some nurses and staff will require coaching sessions on how to communicate, and in worst case scenarios some nurses and staff, who are unwilling to communicate professionally, will be asked to leave the team
Interprofessional collaboration has been shown to increase access to healthcare, improve outcomes for patients with chronic disease, reduce medical errors, reduce tension and conflict among caregivers, improve the use of clinical resources, and lower rates of staff turnover (Lemieux-Charles & McGuire, 2006). IPE is a means to promote collaboration between health care professions. In a study designed to assess the effectiveness of IPE interventions compared to separate, profession-specific education interventions, 4 of 6 studies found that IPE improved patient satisfaction, collaborative team behaviour, and decreased clinical error in emergency departments (Reeves et al., 2008).
College of Nurses of Ontario,(2009).Practice Guidelines: Conflict prevention and management. Retrieved April 3, 2014 from http://www.cno.org/Global/docs/prac/47004_conflict_prev.pdf
Conflict has been an issue for man since the dawn of civilization. In today’s fast paced world conflict, especially in the workplace, is a frequent occurrence. When that workplace is a health care environment where lives are at stake, emotions run high and collaboration with many different disciplines is required conflict often becomes a prevalent part of everyday life. Conflicts in the workplace can lead to reduced morale, lowered productivity resulting in decreased patient care and can cause large scale confrontations (Whitworth 2008). In the field of nursing whether a conflict is with a peer, supervisor, physician, or a patient and their family, conflict management is a necessary skill.
The first nurse to introduce quality improvement was Florence Nightingale, who through gathering data on the positive effects of keeping adequate hygiene, nutrition and proper ventilation on the mortality rate during the Crimean War (Hood, 2014, p. 490-491). The initiatives towards improvement of quality lead to formation the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH), which is now known as The Joint Commission (2007). The Joint Commission is non-profit organization which gives accreditation to hospitals for recognizing their efforts to deliver quality health care with an added advantage of being eligible for the Medicare reimbursement program. Moreover, the Joint Commission also rolled out the Hospital Patient Safety Goals (2013) to prevent patient safety errors. Nursing professionals are essential for health care organizations to achieve and maintain the patient-safety goals as their work directly impacts the quality and safety of the patients. For instance, using two patient identifiers during medication administration to avert errors. Nurses have the distinct skills and responsibility towards patient safety and hence the need for Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) is the rational step towards quality improvement. Through the years, the QSEN has developed in Phases to ascertain the areas of competency requirements for nurses to deliver safe, efficient and excellent health care
Effective collaboration within nursing and with other health care professionals can lead to higher quality outcomes (Gardner, 2005). References Gardner, D. (2005). Ten lessons in collaboration. The On-line Journal of Issues in Nursing, 10(1), Retrieved from http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Volume102005/No1Jan05/tpc26_116008.aspx Hess, R. (2004).
The teamwork is usually defined as the process of working together in a group to achieve a common goal. These days working in groups is inevitable. Whether it is a school assignment or working in a clinical settings, we have to work in groups to accomplish a task. We cannot expect to work in isolation all the times. (Stonehouse, 2011)
In the healthcare world, every discipline is integral. Each discipline plays a part and each care provider is part of a team. Achieving the desired patient outcome rests on teamwork and effective communication. In nursing, when teamwork is emphasized and valued, every member works together to meet their patients’ needs with improved patient outcomes as their common goal (Ward, 2013). Teamwork is a key component of many professions and when employees feel as if they are part of a unit, relevant outcomes are improved.