Interdisciplinary Relationships in Healthcare Teams

Introduction to Interdisciplinary Healthcare Roles

An emergency room (ER) job is both prestigious and demanding; it affords individuals the opportunity to save lives and build a meaningful career. Of all nursing roles, the most challenging and interesting is, perhaps, that of an ER nurse. In the fast-paced ER environment, nurses must know how to assess and treat patients across all age groups — from newborns to the elderly. Time management skills are an essential requirement for all emergency room personnel. ER staff — whether nurses or physicians — must be genuine, confident, and experienced professionals.

A job at a pharmaceutical firm also guarantees healthcare workers a promising career and grants them indispensable experience. Some physicians join these companies to practice medicine and care for staff safety and health. These physicians receive training in public health, rehabilitative medicine, or occupational safety and health, and focus on the prevention and treatment of health disorders developed by individuals working in manufacturing plants or businesses. They are also concerned with the prevention and treatment of common diseases affecting the broader population and with understanding how those diseases affect workplaces.

Professionals collaborating and working in teams must be able to balance their responsibilities, knowledge, values, goals, and patient-care skills with the demands of a team role in which decisions are made collectively. Because many healthcare workers — particularly physicians — are accustomed to clinical practice environments in which doctors make decisions and other professionals implement them, it can be difficult for a physician to adapt to a team model. In such settings, unanimity, majority opinion, consensus, or deference to a more expert member may prove more effective than autocratic decision-making. Moreover, physicians who retain a strictly hierarchical concept of medical care can encounter serious difficulties when disagreements arise with equally prominent colleagues on the healthcare team. Interdisciplinary disagreements occur in every area of medical practice; however, the operating theatre is one model setting in which patient care regularly involves interdisciplinary conflict, compromise, and cooperation.

Conflicts between collaborating parties are inevitable — a well-documented fact since the time of Florence Nightingale. Effective integration of healthcare delivery models offers collaboration opportunities at multiple levels: interdisciplinary, inter-organizational, and intra-organizational. However, the multi-dimensional nature of contemporary healthcare also opens avenues for complex conflicts. This complexity gives nurses added incentive to develop constructive conflict-negotiation skills. Despite longstanding concern about ineffective conflict management in the healthcare sector, the problem persists and may well represent the greatest barrier to successful collaboration. Many healthcare professionals have not been socialized to recognize conflict's potentially positive elements or to understand that constructive conflict can be just as important to effective decision-making as positive emotional relationships (Gardner, 2005).

Avoiding and Resolving Conflict in Healthcare Teams

The keystone of collaborative success is conflict resolution. Like collaboration itself, conflict is complex and capable of both facilitating and obstructing teamwork. When using conflict as a facilitative tool, it is helpful to distinguish task conflict from emotional conflict. Task conflict revolves around differences in judgment about how a shared objective should be achieved, while emotional conflict revolves around interpersonal relationships and may develop out of unresolved task conflicts.

Collaborative leaders must be able to facilitate debate over task-related matters and encourage diverse points of view regarding how a problem is defined and addressed. When personal or emotional conflict arises within a team, 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 intervene only if interpersonal conflict begins to consistently disrupt teamwork. When emotional conflict surfaces within a partnership setting, it must be discussed rather than avoided. Identifying specific words or cues — for example, a particular tone of voice or a lack of eye contact — that trigger the conflict will prove most effective when delivering feedback. How a person interprets non-verbal communication, and how those messages affect the recipient, can provide a useful basis for conflict analysis (Gardner, 2005).

In ideal circumstances, disagreements lead to more comprehensive inter-professional dialogue about patient care and generate new consensus regarding the best course of action. This new consensus may require compromise from all team members. When team members cannot reach agreement, consulting healthcare professionals who are indirectly involved in the patient's care for impartial input may be helpful. If conflict persists, the healthcare organization's ethics committee may be consulted; it will hear the areas of disagreement and recommend solutions (Norman, 2008).

The division of labor among nursing, medical, and allied healthcare practitioners means that no single healthcare professional can provide a patient with a comprehensive episode of care. Of the many traits, skills, motives, and areas of knowledge healthcare professionals bring to the table, the healthcare management team places particular emphasis on three commitments and strongly supports team members who demonstrate them:

First, commitment to the organization, through communicating organizational objectives and goals and helping fellow team members translate organizational needs into team performance outcomes. Second, commitment to quality and collaboration, through fostering the psychological safety necessary for team members to learn from and discuss their errors and to constructively challenge one another when necessary, ensuring superior-quality outcomes (Leggat, 2007).

The collaborative process can be improved through maintaining open communication channels, actively participating in team meetings, and providing excellent, up-to-date progress notes on patient teaching outcomes so that fellow team members remain constantly informed. High-functioning teams typically share certain attributes that enable them to collaborate effectively. Key characteristics of successful interdisciplinary teams include:

Teamwork, Collaboration, and Process Improvement

Good written and verbal communication, facilitated through planning meetings, telephone consultations, patient care sessions, a willingness to invest special effort in ensuring effective communication, and thorough documentation.

A shared aspiration to work in partnership and pursue common goals.

Mutual respect among professionals from different disciplines, including teaching one another, recognizing each other's strengths, and being aware of one's own limitations.