Analyzing the Interdisciplinary Relationships Phenomenon Term Paper

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Interdisciplinary Relationships

An ER (emergency room) job is both prestigious and requires hard work; it affords individuals a chance to save fellow human beings' lives and build a fruitful career. Of all nursing jobs, the most challenging and interesting is, perhaps, a job as an ER nurse. In the fast-paced ER environment, nurses need to know how patients belonging to different age groups, right from just-born babies to aged individuals, are to be assessed and treated. Time management skills are an important requirement for emergency room personnel. ER staff -- whether nurses or physicians -- must be genuine, confident, and experienced professionals. A job at pharmaceutical firms guarantees a healthcare worker a promising career and grants him/her indispensable experience. There are some doctors who join these companies for practicing medicine and caring for staff safety and health. These physicians receive training in public health, rehabilitative medicine or occupational safety and health, and concern themselves with prevention and treatment of health disorders developed by individuals working in manufacturing plants or businesses. Also, they are, of course, interested in prevention and treatment of common diseases afflicting mankind, and in understanding their effect on workplaces.

Professionals collaborating and working in teams need to be able to balance their responsibilities, knowledge, values, goals, and skills pertaining to patient care, with their team role where decisions are made collectively. As many healthcare workers, particularly physicians, are used to clinical practice environments wherein doctors make decisions and other professionals implement them, it is sometimes hard for a physician to adapt him/herself to teams, wherein unanimity, majority opinion, consensus, or regard for the opinion of a member who is more expert, might prove to be more efficient in decision-making techniques than autocratic decisions. Moreover, physicians who retain a hierarchical medical care concept can encounter serious troubles when disagreements ensue with other, equally prominent physicians on the healthcare team. Interdisciplinary disagreements are observed in every medical practice area; however, the operation theatre environment is one model setting wherein patient care entails interdisciplinary conflict, compromise, and cooperation.

How to avoid and resolve conflict

Conflicts between collaborating parties are inevitable -- this is a well-documented fact ever since Florence Nightingale's time. Effective integration of models of healthcare delivery offer multiple-level collaboration opportunities: interdisciplinary, inter-organizational, and intra-organizational levels. But, the multi-dimensional nature of contemporary healthcare services delivery opens avenues for complex conflicts as well. This complexity offers nurses added impetus for learning constructive skills in conflict negotiation. In spite of longstanding concern with regard to ineffective healthcare-sector conflict management, the problem persists, and might well be the greatest barrier to successful collaboration. Numerous professionals in the healthcare sector haven't been socialized for comprehending conflict's potentially-positive elements and recognizing that positive emotional relationships as well as conflicts are just as important to efficient decision-making (Gardner, 2005).

The keystone to collaborative success is conflict resolution. Just like collaboration, conflict is also complex in nature, and is capable of facilitating as well as obstructing collaboration. When employing conflict for facilitating collaboration, differentiating task conflict from emotional conflict is beneficial. The former revolves around judgmental differences connected to how some common objective is to be achieved, while the latter revolves around relationships among individuals, and may develop from task conflicts.

Collaborative leaders need to have the ability to facilitate conflict/debate over task-related matters and encourage expression of diverse points-of-view with regard to how any problem is defined and dealt with. If personal issues and emotional conflict arise in the team setting, leaders must be capable of redirecting concerns from personal to task-related issues. Individuals engaged in personal conflict are expected to resolve such matters outside group discussions. The group should only intervene if this interpersonal conflict starts consistently to disrupt teamwork. If an emotional conflict surfaces within partnership settings, it must be discussed, rather than avoided. Mentioning specific words or cues (for instance, a particular tone taken while speaking, or no eye contact) triggering the conflict will prove most effective while providing feedback with this regard. How a person interprets non-verbal communication and how the messages impact the recipient can offer a basis for conflict analysis (Gardner, 2005).

Disagreements, in ideal situations, result in a more comprehensive inter-professional dialogue pertaining to patient care, and give rise to novel consensus regarding the best strategy to employ. This novel consensus might require certain compromises from all team members. When team members fail to reach consensus with regard to what ought to be done, consulting other healthcare professionals indirectly involved in patient care for impartial input may prove useful.

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If the conflict persists, the healthcare organization's ethics committee may be consulted, which will listen to the areas of disagreements and offer solutions (Norman, 2008).

How to work as a team and collaborate with other departments, and ways to make the process better

Division of labor between nursing, medical, and associated healthcare practitioners implies that no lone healthcare professional can provide any patient with a comprehensive healthcare episode. Of all traits, skills, motives, and knowledge provided, the healthcare management team emphasizes three motives and strongly supports team members demonstrating commitment to:

The organization, through the communication of organizational objectives and goals and aiding fellow team members in translating organizational needs into team performance outcomes, and Quality and collaboration, through the facilitation of required psychological safety between team members, which allows them to learn from and discuss their errors and challenge fellow team members when needed, for ensuring outcome of superior quality (Leggat, 2007).

The process can be improved as follows; maintaining open communication channels; active participation in team meetings; and providing excellent-quality up-to-date progress notes concerning patient teaching outcomes, to ensure that fellow team members remain constantly informed. Sound teams typically cite certain traits that enable them to collaborate efficiently. Some attributes of successful interdisciplinary teams are:

Good written as well as verbal communication, facilitated through planning meetings, telephone consultation, patient care sessions, willingness to put special efforts into ensuring effective communication occurs, and good documentation.

An aspiration to work in partnership and recognize a shared goal.

Mutual respect between professionals from different disciplines, teaching one another, recognizing respective fortes, and being aware of one's limits.

Personal experience with an interdisciplinary relationship

I would outline how my personal experiences with interdisciplinary relationships have worked as follows: Interdisciplinary relationships among individuals are of utmost importance; there are numerous issues which must be resolved between individuals. Different situations impact the character of individuals and their perception of situations; hence, effective communication is the only means by which misunderstandings can be prevented. Interdisciplinary relationships involve collaboration and communication.

Working in teams comprising of members from different disciplines for building electronic records affords clinicians a chance to analyze the roles of other disciplines in the healthcare organization. With the strong support of information services staff members, nurses worked closely with pharmacy team members for designing doctor order systems, which met the information access needs of both groups, and helped cultivate mutual respect among involved parties for what other disciplines bring with them to the continuum of care.

How interdisciplinary relationships affect organizations and the patients and families

The significance of interdisciplinary participation in the overall healthcare team proves critical to efficient patient care; it is one area focused on by the JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations). While some agencies did achieve superior quality interdisciplinary collaboration, barriers are frequently erected among disciplines owing to inadequate communication.

This may bring about conflicts relating to "turf" and the inability to work together, between individuals as well as in team meetings. Patients usually feel baffled by the repetition of instructions, already communicated to them earlier, by multiple team members. The need for moving patients forward through the system of health care effectively and cost-effectively means that healthcare professionals (including nurses) need to be familiar with techniques to collaboratively provide patient teaching (Euro Med Info, n.d.).

Owing to nursing's visible and constant presence at patients' bedside, nurses occupy a unique position, from which they can effectively capitalize on different disciplines' strengths for ultimate patient benefit, and lead patient education. Recognizing the potential significant contributions of other healthcare providers to patient education is one key component of nurses' knowledge base. For doing so, nurses require an accurate grasp of individual team members' expertise.

Physicians assist patients in understanding their respective healthcare issue and treatment plan. According to physicians, nurses are relied on for reinforcing what they teach patients. Patients and their families typically pose their follow-up queries to nurses, particularly if they fail to clearly understand physician instructions and explanations, or have any additional questions. Physician-nurse collaboration improves with effective documentation and good communication (Euro Med Info, n.d.).

Physical therapists coach patients and their families with regard to mobility as well as how functional activities can be safely performed. Occupational therapy training concentrates on how adaptations can be made that grant patients maximum possible independence in everyday activities. Occupational and physical therapists rely on nurses for educating patients about disease conditions and reinforcing instructions, especially those pertaining to completing transfers, positioning, and utilization of adaptive….....

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