Team charter recommendation
The delivery of high quality and safe health care service is facilitated in a clinical setting by the collaboration and contribution of multi-professional team. To recognize the goal of effective and patient-centered health care delivery, effective team work and proper collaboration is considered a necessary part of health care practice (Babiker et al., 2014) In response to the launch of an inter-professional team that will be working on challenging cases, the purpose of this report to provide recommendations for team charter to support establishing ground rules and expectation and propose communication and collaboration strategies to effective collaboration between multi-professional team.
Since team members from different specialization are going to work as inter-professional team, it is necessary to clarify all team members regarding ground rules and expectations to minimize conflicts, difference in expectation and reduce medical errors. The following team charter recommendation is proposed for the efficiency of the team:
- It is necessary to establish ground rules and expectationsfor the multi-professional team by making all members very clear about their own role and the expectation and standards of care needed while handling critical cases. To help every member contribute equally to team work, establishing role clarity is essential. This will increase the likelihood of team success and each member’s satisfaction with the work too (Bosch & Mansell, 2015). In addition, setting performance standards and expectations for patient safety is necessary so that uniformity and consistency of performance can be maintained. The leader of the team can establish performance norms and frame expectations that emphasize on patient safety (Balki et al., 2017). For example, practice guidelines related to patient safety can be distributed and each member can be educated about their role in patient safety.
- When members from different specialization will come together to work as a multi-professional team, there are high chances of conflict because of lack of trust and differences in personality and expectationsof each team members. For example, difference in opinion may exist regarding handling any patient case. Other sources of team conflict may include role boundary issue, scope of practice and accountability issues. Such issues may deteriorate team performance and lead to loosely coordinated team relationship. This eventually will have an impact on the outcome of patient (Bosch & Mansell, 2015). Hence, the best conflict resolution strategies for multiprofessional team include developing team resolution protocols and leadership interventions to resolve conflict. For instance, team resolution protocols can instruct member regarding focusing on problem solving and working with shared goals. Leaders can also encourage members to develop values of respect and humility and learn to negotiate. Open communication is also the best step to resolve conflict (Brown et al., 2011).
- One of the threats to the efficiency of the new multi-professional team includes the team leadership issue. For instance, if ideal leader is not present in the team, gap in collaboration and team efficiency may exist. It can have an impact on process quality and patient safety too (McFadden, Stock & Gowen III, 2015).Hence, leadership strategy is crucial to achieve a competitive age. To choose the member who will lead the team, the preference should be given to individuals who possess leadership competencies like experience in clinical practice, good management attributes, commitment to improve health of population and accepting rules, regulations and code of conducts. For example, such individuals should have a sense of mission, ability to influence people, implement creative decision making to promote team performance and develop positive work environment (Nancarrow et al., 2013). Leaders with such quality are essential to effectively handle critical patient cases as well as team conflict related issues. If the chosen leader is found to be ineffective, then they can be given opportunities for development by analysis of development needs in individual leaders. This can be done by formal or informal skill gap analysis.
For the success of the new multi-professional team, the main priority will be implementing best practices for effective communication and inter-professional collaboration between team members. The following are the recommendations for the best practices related to effective inter-professional collaboration in multi-professional team:
- The best practice for inter-professional collaboration is establishing a common communication and collaboration framework. This is necessary to enter into respectful collaborative communication and resolve conflicts. This may be done by the use of evidence based tools like SBAR (Situation-background-assessment-recommendation) which can increased both inter-professional competence of team members as well as promote attitude towards timely communication between team. The key actions mentioned in the SBAR tool allows for a common communication structure those health care professional needs to follow for communicating and sharing information with the team. It can help team members to systematically organize the information and suggest actions to other team members during handover or other meeting. Such move can have positive implications on patient care and safety (Kostoff et al., 2016). Various types of communication technologies such as electronic messaging, telephone, video-conferencing and emails can be used for communication between multi-professional team. Different types of communication technology can close the gap in practice setting and increase the pace of information sharing and taking timely response for patients (Shrader et al., 2016).
- Different types of communication tools like e-mails, voice mail and face-to-face conversation can be used for collaboration between multiple health care team. The effectiveness of each of them is seen in different situations. Face-to-face communication is effective when there is a need for team meeting or team orientation on important priority of the day or related to team hurdle before handling critical task. Such type of communication adds value to communication and eliminate misunderstandings too. However, face-to-face communication becomes ineffective when the team is large or when there is high work pressure. It also depends on the attentiveness of listeners too. In contrast, e-mail and voices mails are effective to share important detail about patient and daily work procedure. The advantage of this tool is that it is the most convenient way to share health information and daily work priorities to team members. However, the disadvantage is that inappropriate emails sometimes increase risk of miscommunication and diagnostics errors too. It is necessary to recognize the best communication tools based on analysis of situations to promote productive team work (Okuyama, Wagner & Bijnen, 2014).
Conclusion:
The above recommendations summarized approach needed to establish a successful inter-professional team and promote effective communication between team members. Standards of care, expected professional performance and parameters of quality care and patient safety should be established based on demand of work and organizational rules and regulation to facilitate the success of the team. Communication is also an important pillar of team efficiency and there is a need to incorporate best communication tool for communication in various situations.
Reference:
Babiker, A., El Husseini, M., Al Nemri, A., Al Frayh, A., Al Juryyan, N., Faki, M. O., … & Al Zamil, F. (2014). Health care professional development: Working as a team to improve patient care. Sudanese journal of paediatrics, 14(2), 9.
Balki, M., Hoppe, D., Monks, D., Cooke, M. E., Sharples, L., & Windrim, R. (2017). Multidisciplinary Delphi Development of a Scale to Evaluate Team Function in Obstetric Emergencies: The PETRA Scale. Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada, 39(6), 434-442.
Bosch, B., & Mansell, H. (2015). Interprofessional collaboration in health care: Lessons to be learned from competitive sports. Canadian Pharmacists Journal/Revue des Pharmaciens du Canada, 148(4), 176-179.
Brown, J., Lewis, L., Ellis, K., Stewart, M., Freeman, T. R., & Kasperski, M. J. (2011). Conflict on interprofessional primary health care teams–can it be resolved?. Journal of interprofessional care, 25(1), 4-10.
Kostoff, M., Burkhardt, C., Winter, A., & Shrader, S. (2016). An interprofessional simulation using the SBAR communication tool. American journal of pharmaceutical education, 80(9), 157.
McFadden, K. L., Stock, G. N., & Gowen III, C. R. (2015). Leadership, safety climate, and continuous quality improvement: impact on process quality and patient safety. Health care management review, 40(1), 24-34.
Nancarrow, S. A., Booth, A., Ariss, S., Smith, T., Enderby, P., & Roots, A. (2013). Ten principles of good interdisciplinary team work. Human resources for Health, 11(1), 19.
Okuyama, A., Wagner, C., & Bijnen, B. (2014). Speaking up for patient safety by hospital-based health care professionals: a literature review. BMC health services research, 14(1), 61.
Shrader, S., Kostoff, M., Shin, T., Heble, A., Kempin, B., Miller, A., & Patykiewicz, N. (2016). Using communication technology to enhance interprofessional education simulations. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 80(1), 13.