Roles and Contributions of Interdisciplinary Team Members
An interdisciplinary approach tends to ensure higher-quality results in work. However, certain factors, such as interdisciplinary training, relationship group dynamics, and teamwork, should be considered. Group dynamics can be defined as the general behavior of a given sample of human beings within a given institutional organization. The characteristics of group dynamics can be termed as the description of how the group should be organized and operated and compositions of techniques such as brainstorming and role-playing. Another characteristic of group dynamics includes the description of the group formation, structure, and the individual effect on each member. Finally, it refers to the change that takes place within the group.
Members of a given group bear some distinct psychological factors; they equally possess interaction traits with specified ideas and definite roles that they each play. Besides, the group operates common tasks delegated among its participants, thus providing certain features of group dynamics. Interestingly, two perceptions about this aspect are categorized as positive and negative. Those with negative perceptions argue that there are no groups but disjoint ideas that are brought together without a proven positive impact. In contrast, the second category insists that groups exist and, when organized adequately, entail major improvements in care delivery.
On the other hand, teamwork means partnering with others to work collectively towards achieving the objective of a given organization. Through teamwork, there is the generation of new ideas and reduced workload as there is a combination of efforts and promotion of risk-taking toward the organization’s success. On the contrary, it can also fail as a result of a lack of leadership, lack of proper training, defined goals, and incentives. Fears of failure, not taking into consideration the strength and weaknesses of nurses, excessive employee turnover, and feelings of exclusion from other members are some other risk factors in this regard.
Human factors are vital in ensuring patients’ safety within clinical care. Patient safety care can be ensured through human factors adherence to developing a culture of safety by encouraging staff to learn from preventable incidents, designing reliability by agreeing on the work and committing to applying the knowledge. In addition to that, this can also be done through thinking of and designing a better. The impotence of human factors in ensuring patient safety can be viewed from three perspectives: the rise of medical errors, clinical burnout, and the second victim of medical error. There are different types of medical errors, such as diagnostic, treatment, preventive care, etc.
Medical errors are mostly caused by complicated and inconsistent technology, heavy regulation, high-risk task, the need for infection control, sleep deprivation, and multidisciplinary terms. Therefore, world medical organizations have tried minimizing medical errors through intensive diversion to specialized treatment and designs. This helps create high interaction between the clinician and the physician, enabling well-functioning, thus enhancing better health care. The preventive measures that could curb the errors and improve clinical outcomes are implemented through the correct assessment of risks faced by the patients.
Clinical governance is defined as the systematic procedures of sustaining and improving high-quality standards of patient care. This includes all the activities taken by the multidisciplinary team to ensure the quality and well-being of expectant mothers and infants. Maintaining patient safety is the key goal of clinical governance, and this is ensured through concentration on the acquisition of knowledge skills related to diagnostic intervention. According to the Ockenden report review, poor governance structure greatly impacted the well-being of patients (Department of Health and Social Care, 2022). The research was carried out, which gave an overview of all the clinical and maternal services, such as antenatal, postnatal, obstetric anesthesia, and intrapartum. The report suggested that staff failed to recognize and act upon abnormal cardiograph (CTG) tracing due to the poor governance structure. There was no adherence to national institute and clinical excellence guidelines. Finally, there was a lack of appropriate staff training.
Poor teamwork, communication, and coordination have resulted in deaths or complications for many patients, raising the alarm in the national healthcare sector. The deaths have resulted from delayed medication and diagnosis, wrong prescription and injection of a patient with the wrong medicine, technological failure incoordination, and different ideologies among staff members. However, in another state in the healthcare sector, the staff has managed to portray the positive impacts of teamwork and coordination to the patients.
Principles of Effective Leadership
The NMC code on the responsibilities of midwives is based on four main pillars, which include prioritizing people, safe preservation, effective practice, and promoting leadership trust and skills. To understand the importance of effective leadership and management of priorities in delegating tasks considering organizational priorities, an escalation (including the SBAR framework) should be considered. Escalation can be defined as the proportion of patients that fail to have their health escalated according to the local escalation protocol type of quality measure that is the measuring rationale.
Most reporters have raised concerns over time for instant Mother and Baby Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries (MBRRACE) on escalation and delegation by midwives. The reports depict that there have been increased rates of maternal deaths from 2016 to 2018 and death of twin pregnancies (MacGregor et al., 2021, p. 151). According to the research carried out with a sample of 566 women, 90% had maternal complications, and the factors that were discovered to likely lead to the death of women at maternal are deprivation, known heart diseases, mental health problems, smoking, unemployment, belonging to the minority ethnic group, delayed antenatal care and previous pregnancy. However, the reports suggest that the death figures depicted result from poor medication services and, therefore, can be prevented by improving technology and work efficiency.
SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation) is a reliable and validated communication asset that has reduced adverse events in the hospital setting by improving communications among healthcare providers and promoting patient safety. The implementation of SBAR ensures improved clinical practices such as telephone communications between nurses and doctors in critical conditions, general patient handoff, and overall team communication (Ruder, 2019). According to the National Library of Medicine, the use of SBAR has lowered the adverse condition in hospital wards and reduced the number of accidental deaths. SBAR techniques also establish a process of handoff reports that works across all disciplines., improves health providers, and advance the culture of safety. it has also solved the problem of omissions of details by applying a system and structure to information presentation. This information demonstrates that leadership can significantly improve the functioning of a multidisciplinary team (MTD) and its care provision during or after an incident.
The core of the discussion is effective leadership; it is, therefore, essential to be well acquainted with the impotence in the health sector and some styles of leadership, the strength and weaknesses the same. Effective leadership is the systematic provision of positive and constructive ideas toward achieving the targets per the stakeholders’ requirements. It is vital in nursing as it provides the best ethical ways to ensure that procedures are completed in the right manner as per the acts (Cahyani et al., 2020). The possible leadership that are actively practiced in the identified setting are as follows:
- The democratic leadership style is considered the most efficient as it considers all staff members in collective brainstorming and decision-making. The disadvantage comes in case of differences in ideologies; thus, there is time wastage to agree.
- Autocratic leadership is mainly concerned with what should be done and at what time. It does not provide a chance for negotiations and brainstorming, which is the main the disadvantage.
- In transactional leadership, the staff members are awarded specific duties to encourage them to do the same, such as bonuses and tokens for reaching a specified target. The disadvantage of this leadership is that it binds staff members in a specified area and thus cannot go beyond their comfort zones.
- In a coach-like leadership style, a leader identifies specific and admirable traits in a worker and tries to work on them to increase output efficiency.
Conflict management is one of the essential components of effective leadership. In the healthcare setting, conflicts are caused by underlying disagreements regarding treatment procedures and decisions made within the medical team. Since conflicts are typical in interdisciplinary teams comprised of diverse backgrounds, the fundamental principles of teamwork are compromised. Thus, it falls upon the leader to identify, resolve, and prevent conflicts within their scope of control. This can be done by ensuring an honest exchange of opinions in which each party has the opportunity to be heard.
Data Confidentiality in Communication
These include the learning outcomes for the enhancement of effective communication. It’s based on the key success of communication, such as interactive, dynamic, and informative. The methods of communication used include linguistical or alphabetical, visual gestures, which is the use of videos, aura audio, and spatial, which involves physical coordination position and proximity. Data sharing through GDPR ensures that before sharing personal data, there is a good reason for sharing, and the subject is informed about the process.
In terms of effective healthcare delivery, digital technology is actively used today. One of the most topical areas of its application is embodied by the widespread of electronic health records. They represent vast databases that contain pertinent information on the patient in a digital form, including their personal information and medical history (Ash et al., 2021). On the one hand, this technology ensures an efficient exchange of data between units and institutions. Furthermore, this framework helps to count relevant metrics and statistics that track the prevalence of certain diseases and complications and the effectiveness of various interventions (Kim et al., 2019). As a result, the paradigm of evidence-based care is actively supported by the implementation of digital technology.
On the other hand, the convenience of electronic records is mediated by the corresponding data safety concerns. Physical copies of records are more difficult to access, which also applies to those who make such attempts with malicious intent. Data theft is not uncommon today as hackers and frauds continuously gather personal information that can be sold or otherwise used for personal profits. When the data is stored digitally, its resilience to external interference may be lower as compared to being physically locked within the premises of the institution. In this regard, it may be wise to limit the number of such people to a minimum that will ensure the efficiency of the work while accounting for the possibility of a data leak.
Reference List
Ash, J. S. et al. (2021) ‘Safe use of the EHR by medical scribes: a qualitative study’, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 28(2), pp. 294–302.
Berg, L. et al. (2022) ‘Women who decline blood during labor: a review of findings and lessons learned from 52 years of confidential inquiries into maternal mortality in the United Kingdom (1962-2019)’, European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, 271, pp. 20–26. doi: 10.1016/j.ejogrb.2022.01.028
Cahyani, U. R. et al. (2020) ‘Mental distress in rural areas of Indonesia’, Nurse Media Journal of Nursing, 10(1), pp. 1–10.
Department of Health and Social Health. (2022).Final report of the Ockenden review. U.K. Government.
Kim, E. et al. (2019) ‘The evolving use of electronic health records (EHR) for research’, Seminars in Radiation Oncology, 29(4), pp. 354–361.
MacGregor, B. et al. (2022) ‘EMBRACE 2021: we are all part of the solution to prevent maternal deaths’, British Journal of General Practice, 72(717), pp. 148–149.
Ruder, B. J. (2019).Quest for a cure: persistent residual incontinence post-obstetric fistula repair in Uganda. Oregon State University.