scholarly journals Effective Team Working in Health Care

Author(s):  
Michael A. West ◽  
Lynn Markiewicz

In this chapter we show that team working is vital for high quality health care but that team working is often poor. We draw on research to show that effective team working is associated with fewer errors that harm staff and patients; fewer staff injuries; better staff well-being; higher levels of patient satisfaction; better quality of care; and lower patient mortality. “Pseudo team working” leads to the opposite outcomes. We describe how effective team based working can be developed and identify the importance of team objectives and leadership. The chapter describes the specific challenges for team working in health care, including the complexity of the context and the historical legacy of separate professional development and status hierarchies. We explore how these challenges can be overcome, arguing that ensuring effective team working in health care is critical to ensuring the delivery of high quality, continually improving and compassionate health care.

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 235-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Griffiths

When the National Health Service (NHS) was born in 1948, there was no specific agenda for clinical quality, which was assumed to be inherent in the system. The received wisdom was that good professional training with self-regulation and appropriate opportunities for ongoing professional development all inevitably added up to high-quality health care. Unfortunately, as we now know, this was not and is not true. What quality initiatives there were tended to be disconnected, with duplication, inefficiency and complicated processes all too often the result. Understanding of the relationships between structures, processes and outcomes improved in the 1970s, but in the 1980s, effort was arguably constrained by a prominent emphasis on organisational performance and cost containment.


2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 411-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew R. Cooperberg ◽  
John D. Birkmeyer ◽  
Mark S. Litwin

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Chan ◽  
Concetta Tania Di Iorio ◽  
Simon De Lusignan ◽  
Daniel Lo Russo ◽  
Craig Kuziemsky ◽  
...  

Sharing health and social care data is essential to the delivery of high quality health care as well as disease surveillance, public health, and for conducting research. However, these societal benefits may be constrained by privacy and data protection principles. Hence, societies are striving to find a balance between the two competing public interests. Whilst the spread of IT advancements in recent decades has increased the demand for an increased privacy and data protection in many ways health is a special case.UK, are adopting guidelines, codes of conduct and regulatory instruments aimed to implement privacy principles into practical settings and enhance public trust. Accordingly, in 2015, the UK National Data Guardian (NDG) requested to conduct a further review of data protection, referred to as Caldicott 3.  The scope of this review is to strengthen data security standards and confidentiality. It also proposes a consent system based on an “opt-out” model rather than on “opt-in.Across Europe as well as internationally the privacy-health data sharing balance is not fixed.  In Europe enactment of the new EU Data Protection Regulation in 2016 constitute a major breakthrough, which is likely to have a profound effect on European countries and beyond.  In Australia and across North America different ways are being sought to balance out these twin requirements of a modern society - to preserve privacy alongside affording high quality health care for an ageing population.  Whilst in the UK privacy legal framework remains complex and fragmented into different layers of legislation, which may negatively impact on both the rights to privacy and health the UK is at the forefront in the uptake of international and EU privacy and data protection principles. And, if the privacy regime were reorganised in a more comprehensive manner, it could be used as a sound implementation model for other countries.


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