Strategies On the Effective Types of Healthcare Work Teams
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Strategies On the Effective Types of Healthcare Work Teams
Teamwork is crucial to healthcare provision. The division of labor among nursing, medical, and related health practitioners implies that no single professional can provide a complete episode of care (Leggat, 2007). To ensure with the types of work teams that are most suited to achieve better outcomes and fewer adverse events for patients, healthcare administrators should consider the following strategies:
Team abilities: The team should be composed of members with problem-solving skills, decision-making skills and technical expertise. This will ensure that they have good interpersonal skills required for effective care delivery.
Team personalities: Teams tend to perform well when they have a “higher than mean” level of such traits like extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Team roles: Healthcare administrators should ensure that the team members are selected to fill all the roles allocated, and the members should be matched to the team role demands.
Demographic team diversity: A team will be more effective if it features members of diverse education, gender, age, experience and functional background. This team composition will bring along varied expertise and ideas that would enhance care delivery.
Team size: The team should be made up of only members required to do the work. More often than note, mutual accountability and cohesiveness tend to suffer in teams made up of more members than required, which may result in social loafing.
Cognitive ability: The average cognitive ability of team members is related to the performance of that team. For instance, hierarchical decision-making teams will be more effective when the leader and the staff are high in cognitive ability.
Individual team members have their weight: Each member of the group should show the desire to meet or exceed the group’s expectations.
Disagreement in the team is viewed as good: A team will be effective if disagreements are not prematurely suppressed. Instead, the reasons are objectively examined and a solution sought.
Informal, comfortable, and relaxed work environment: The healthcare providers making up the team have to work in an atmosphere with no obvious tensions. The members have to be involved and interested in achieving better outcomes and fewer adverse events for patients.
A team that works together to set clear and challenging performance goals: The team should be able to work as a unit to define and achieve a continuous series of goals as they move towards a larger goal. In this way, they will be able to offer the most effective care to the patients.
References
Leggat, S. G. (2007). Effective healthcare teams require effective team members: defining teamwork competencies. BMC health services research, 7(1), 17.