Question

Consider your current work environment and your role as a member of the health care team. What can you do to encourage collaboration and demonstrate stewardship?

Answer 1

Ans) Too often, effective teamwork exists more in theory than in practice. Unfortunately, there are more barriers to effective collaboration in healthcare than you can shake a stick at.

- Common obstacles to collaboration between members of the healthcare team:

❉ Personal values and expectations
❉ Personality differences
❉ Hierarchy
❉ Disruptive behavior
❉ Culture and ethnicity
❉ Generational differences
❉ Gender
❉ Historical interprofessional and intraprofessional rivalries
❉ Differences in language and jargon
❉ Differences in schedules and professional routines
❉ Varying levels of preparation, qualifications and status
❉ Differences in requirements, regulations and norms of professional education
❉ Fears of diluted professional identity
❉ Differences in accountability, payment and rewards
❉ Concerns regarding clinical responsibility
❉ Complexity of care
❉ Emphasis on rapid decision-making.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES:

- There will always be impediments to communication and collaboration. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t tried and true ways to overcome those barriers. Here are six strategies to help you do it:

1. Look in the mirror.

Effective collaboration with the other members of your team starts with you, which makes self-awareness your first step. After all, if you don’t understand what makes you tick, you can’t expect your colleagues to figure it out. Take another look at the list above and ask yourself honestly which of those points make you tense.

- If you’re new to this kind of self-analysis, ask a trusted friend to help you. Being aware of your own triggers and hot buttons will help you develop techniques for dealing with them before you reach the point of throwing down your stethoscope and stalking out the door.

2. Create a safe space to share information.

- No one likes being yelled at, dismissed or ridiculed for offering an opinion or asking a question. If those reactions are part of your organizational culture, they will shame people into silence, which is an enormous barrier to good teamwork. Mutually beneficial relationships depend on the sharing of information, which makes it vital that team members listen to one another and reinforce the value of each other’s input.

- This is an area where rookies often fare better than more seasoned team members. If you’re new, it’s easier to embrace the idea that no question is silly, but for veterans, it can take real courage to admit you don’t know something or risk offering an opinion that others may reject.

- Practice listening and responding constructively to the other people on your team even when you disagree or when they ask a question whose answer seems obvious to you. Doing that will help create an environment where team members — including you — don’t have to suffer in silence for not having all the answers.

3. Handle conflict with care.

- There’s no healthcare environment on Earth that’s free of conflict, which is why it’s important to manage it well. In fact, some experts point to poor conflict management as the single most critical obstacle to effective collaboration.

- Trying to avoid conflict entirely isn’t the answer. Sometimes, being willing to fight is part of your responsibility as a patient advocate. In some circumstances, avoiding an argument can cause real harm. However, handling conflicts professionally will ultimately help everyone, especially the patients under your care.

4. Belong to the right team.

- The best care is provided by truly interdisciplinary teams in which professionals from different areas meld their diverse knowledge and experience to achieve a common goal. Sadly, too many supposedly interdisciplinary teams are really multidisciplinary. They are collections of professionals so focused on their own precious areas of practice that the idea of listening to or involving anyone else in a meaningful way just isn’t in the cards.

- Remember that a group of people each working in their own little silo is not a team, and it takes a team to create the best possible care plan for each patient.

5. Communicate effectively.

- There are several facets to this one. Communications between nurses is comparatively easy because nurses usually understand each other pretty well. The important points there include clarity, honesty, compassion, and respectfully resolving grievances rather than letting them ferment into grudges.

- Communicating with professionals in other disciplines, particularly physicians, can present more of a challenge. (We’ve all experienced the good, the bad and the ugly in that area!) One of the keys to communicating with doctors and other types of healthcare professionals is recognizing the distinct ways each discipline approaches patient care.