TEAM WORK IN A MEDICAL UNIT: DREAM OR A REALITY
‘TEAM- Together Everyone Achieves More’ is a guiding principle in all departments in all organizations. On literature search, we can find plenty of materials relating to goals, principles and strategies for team work in health care settings. But are we practising it in clinical settings? And if not, is it due to lack of knowledge and skill regarding implementation of strategies for team work or is it due to attitude problems of leaders who want to force their way of thinking and their opinion in everything and then blame others or juniors for any error which is incurred? Cohesive health care teams have 5 key characteristics- Clear goals with measurable outcomes, clinical administrative systems, division of labour, training of all team members and effective communication [1]. The quality of team work is associated with higher quality of patient safety care systems and is imperative in reducing errors. This requires that staff be comfortable in recognizing and discussing challenging situations. Structural briefing and debriefing are an effective team strategy, but they like all other interventions require strong leadership to realize their benefits [2]. The hall mark of high performing organizations is that leaders defined a very clear set of behaviours that apply to everyone whether they clean the floor or are the chief of staff [3]. Smart teams are not simple team of smart members and collective intelligence requires social perceptiveness of team members or their ability to infer others mental state such as beliefs or feeling based subtle cues [4]. The study highlights that for creating smart team two critical communication processes are required from team members i.e. (a). Speak up when their expertise can be useful & (b). Influence the team’s work so that the team does its collective best for the patient [4]. The incorporation of sharing responsibilities with accountability between team members in health care systems offers great benefit. However, shared responsibility without high quality team work can result in immediate risk for patients [5]. As is a common saying ‘where everyone is responsible actually no one is responsible’, which can be a dangerous situation for health care services.