The Critical Teamwork Competencies and Skills that Health Professionals need to develop Teamwork in the Healthcare Setting
Even though effective teamwork has been noted consistently to be a requirement for better health provision outcomes, people know less of the skills and the competencies that make the care professionals imperative team members. The first critical teamwork skill that health professionals must develop is communication, which without things are likely to fall apart. Lack of communication skills is a cross-cutting aspect resulting in more harm and an independent grounds of harm to the patient that could have been prevented. According to Rosen et al. (2018), poor communication among team members, especially regarding medication dose, name, administration timing, and the delivery route, can result in errors in medication.
The other teamwork skill that health professionals need to develop to ensure that there is teamwork is having a team-based goal setting (Earnest et al. 2017). Team members need definitive goals to develop the collaborative effort which is required among service providers, family members, and care providers. Healthcare leaders and professionals will be able to provide this through written and verbal policy. Team leaders establish accountability and objectives to make sure there is organizational productivity.
Apart from clinical expertise, there are other competencies that are essential for the professional growth of every health disciple in creating skills that are not technical to foster collaboration and teamwork across disciples. Therefore, healthcare professionals must adopt is encouraging trust and respect among the teams. Two-way conversations that are sincere build the trust that is needed to develop professional rapport and deliver effective services (Wagner et al. 2017). The strong communication skills that leaders develop help them connect produce better results, and connect with others. In this kind of environment, healthcare leaders teach the team members to work on opportunities for trust-building when it is possible.
Burns, Bradley & Weiner (2018) add that fairness by the healthcare leaders is critical to foster better working relationships. Relationships are fair at the instances when the entire team feels that their results are proportionate to the contributions that they make. Individuals are known to evaluate fairness when they compare themselves to their coworkers. Workers in healthcare are motivated by the equity in processes and procedures that are used by the managers to determine the outcomes.
References
Burns, L., Bradley, E., & Weiner, B. (2018). Shortell and Kaluzny’s healthcare management: organization design and behavior. Cengage Learning.
Earnest, M. A., Williams, J., & Aagaard, E. M. (2017). Toward an optimal pedagogy for teamwork. Academic Medicine, 92(10), 1378-1381.
Rosen, M. A., DiazGranados, D., Dietz, A. S., Benishek, L. E., Thompson, D., Pronovost, P. J., & Weaver, S. J. (2018). Teamwork in healthcare: Key discoveries enabling safer, high-quality care. American Psychologist, 73(4), 433.
Wagner, E. H., Flinter, M., Hsu, C., Cromp, D., Austin, B. T., Etz, R., … & Ladden, M. D. (2017). Effective team-based primary care: observations from innovative practices. BMC family practice, 18(1), 13.