High-functioning health care teams can’t work effectively unless team members with different backgrounds and training know how to cooperate and work together, but that is difficult to achieve.
“For a hundred years or more, these professions have developed in parallel,” says William Branch Jr., MD, Carter Smith Sr. Professor of Medicine in Emory’s School of Medicine. “They work together according to certain traditions and rules, but without a lot of communication.”
The stakes are high: patients can suffer when these professionals fail to communicate. Now, however, a team of researchers based at Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, the Emory School of Medicine and the Emory Clinic as well as seven other U.S. teaching hospitals, reports developing successful techniques for overcoming the friction and misunderstanding that can arise when health care professionals with different roles come together to work with patients.
Their report, published in the journal BMJ Open, grows out of a new group-based development program for future health care teachers and leaders meant to instill attitudes of respect, collegiality, understanding and trust between the different professions. The program was tested in 2017 at five university-based health centers.
In the program, small groups of participants worked with each other and with facilitators twice a month, using critical reflection and experiential learning to improve collaboration in the kinds of difficult situations health care teams might encounter.
“It could be a role play that we do the next time we meet,” Branch explained. “It could be watching a videotape together. It could just be that people go out and do these things, then they come back and share stories of what they were able to do. This leads them to have ideas of further things to do towards better communication, better relationships, better teamwork.”
To measure the effectiveness of the program, instead of a survey or…
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