NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork

NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork

NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork

 

Think back to your most recent time in the clinical setting when another discipline (respiratory, physical therapy, nutrition, occupational therapy) was utilized.

according to NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork, describe a form of interdisciplinary collaborative care you’ve seen on your current assigned clinical or work site. Then have a discussion about the following questions:

Who coordinated that care? What was the nurse’s role in ascertaining that the care was provided?

Was the patient’s outcome met? How or why not? What would you, a novice nurse-leader, have done differently to achieve the patient’s goals?

As concern over the number of health care errors has risen, so has interest in the development of care delivery processes that minimize the potential for error. Among the strategies proposed by experts is the creation, training, and support of highly developed interdisciplinary teams and collaborative work groups (Chassin et al., 1998; Disch et al., 2001; Palmersheim, 1999). The desire for effective team performance has been mentioned in the health care literature for years. What has been less evident is what constitutes effective team performance, how it is created and nurtured, and how it directly or indirectly influences care delivery outcomes. These unknown attributes and products of work teams should be explored thoroughly to enable sound recommendations concerning the promotion of interdisciplinary teams and collaborative work groups as a measure for assuring safe patient care.

This appendix is divided into three main sections. according to NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork, the first contains an extensive review of the literature concerning interdisciplinary teams and their impact on care delivery and safety outcomes. Included in the review are summaries of relevant research from health care, industry, and other work groups involved in error-prone and high-risk team behaviors. The second section provides evidence-based recommendations for strategies to develop, train, and assess the performance of interdisciplinary teams. The final section delineates needs for further research.

TEAMS AND PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES

according to NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork, the importance of understanding and maximizing team performance has been discussed by several authors, who note that 70 to 80 percent of health care errors are caused by human factors associated with interpersonal interactions (Schaefer et al., 1994). Others stress the increasing numbers of professionals directly involved in care delivery processes and the relationship between the resulting importance of cooperative working relationships and the complexity of patient needs (Headrick et al., 1998). Addressing this demand is hindered by a number of factors, including the wide variation in team makeup, which ranges from those composed of senior clinicians overseeing residents and fellows (Posner and Freund, 1999) to those involving representatives of multiple professions from multiple organizations (Green and Plesk, 2002; Kosseff and Niemeier, 2001; Stone et al., 2002). Clear differences exist in those situations in which team makeup is driven by hierarchical learning or reporting mechanisms and those in which the team members have equal influence on team performance and outcome. In addition, NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork states thathealth professionals interact in a variety of ways, ranging from loosely coordinated collaborative relationships at one end of the continuum to more tightly organized work teams at the other, often within the same day (Headrick et al., 1998). Difficulties also arise when determining whether the failure of a team’s performance is the cause or the result of poor team member behavior. In a study of deteriorating team performance, a back-and-forth pattern developed between member performance and overall team performance as top management teams began to fail (Hambrick and D’Aveni, 1992).

Theories of Work Team Effectiveness

A number of theories exist concerning the ways in which teams work and how they produce favorable outcomes. Some of the more prominent theories relevant to the discussion of decision making for patient safety and for the creation of desirable care delivery outcomes are reviewed below.

Early Theories of Team Behavior

Early theoretical efforts to conceptualize the group processes operating in teams drew heavily upon sociological studies of hierarchical differentiation. In these investigations, the social structure of the group was examined for its impact on team communication and problem solving (Feiger and Schmitt, 1979). In summarizing the basic research in this field, Feiger and Schmitt note that status-driven hierarchical processes undermine analysis and problem-solving activities in teams. NUR2868 Assignment: Module 7 Discussion Teamwork states that these same processes may facilitate coordination and synthesis activities, however. Feiger and Schmitt also examined the relationship between degree of hierarchy and patient outcomes in four teams in a long-term care setting. They found that better outcomes were perfectly rank-correlated with less hierarchy in the interaction patterns of team members.

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