Please when answering the questions list the questions, each answer needs to be in complete sentences and you need to list the page number where you found the answer.
1. What are the differences between a team, a task force, and a committee? What are some of the potential differences in dynamics between people in these different groups? A team is a group of people, working together to achieve a common goal. Teams typically include individuals with complementary skills who are committed to a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable (Buchbinder & Shanks, 2012, p. 88) Task force may be commissioned for several years by a professional association or institute to examine issues in healthcare services delivery, such as medical errors and patient safety. These groups focus on a specific agenda, have a limited term of tenure, and disband when a report or book is issued. (p. 290) A quality assurance committee comprised of individuals from many departments may have people appointed to 3-year terms. At the end of that time, a person whose term has expired steps down, but the committee and the work of the committee lives on.
Committees such as these usually have a person for whom this area is their full-time job, but representatives of multiple disciplines and areas of the organization are required to examine problems and to implement organizational policy decisions. (p. 290)
2. Compare and contrast disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-functional teams. In healthcare organizations, teams can be composed of one or more disciplines, for example, the nursing team, the physician leader team, the management team, or the quality improvement team.
The professional staff needs to work closely and collaboratively to meet patient needs. In other words, the tasks of individual employees affect, and are dependent upon, the work of others. This is known as task interdependency. Because the healthcare needs of patients cut across an organization’s different disciplines or functions, it is important that interdisciplinary clinical teams be set up to ensure the delivery of safe, effective, and timely care.
Cross-functional teams (CFTs) are common in healthcare organizations to address specific organizational needs, such as service excellence, environmental sustainability and green initiatives, and clinical services marketing. These CFTs include representatives from clinical and nonclinical areas of the organization. It is widely believed that the use of clinical and cross-functional teams will become more critical in the future as healthcare organizations become more complex and the demands for effective patient management increase. (p. 88)
3. What are some of the unique challenges associated with teamwork in health care? Describe three benefits and three costs of teamwork in healthcare organizations. The unique challenges associated with teamwork in health care include formal teamwork educational training for physicians and nurses is rare. Developing teams and facilitating team activities are recognized competencies for healthcare managers. However, there is little formal preparation in teamwork in undergraduate and graduate healthcare management education programs.
Conflicts between physicians and nurses are often due to physicians’ refusal to embrace teamwork. Physicians and nurses work from a clinical framework, advocating at the individual level for patients and families. Healthcare managers are trained to look at population level and organization wide issues. (pp. 290-292) The first benefit of teamwork in healthcare organizations is to improve quality of care and corporate productivity when employees were empowered to be innovative and rewarded for performance.
The second benefit of teamwork is to efficient use of healthcare services include sharing different areas of knowledge and expertise, learning from different perspectives, and realizing innovative ideas that come from other team members. The third benefit of teamwork is to improve the retention of nursing staff saves the organization the costs of using agency or traveler nurses, replacing lost nurses and training new ones, and the loss of productivity from burdening the remaining. (pp. p292-294)
The costs of teamwork include the costs of having meetings, along with a place to meet and food and coffee; the costs of trying to arrange a time that’s convenient for most of the participants; time spent in meeting and the accompanying opportunity costs, that is, how that time might have been better spent; the hard-to-measure interpersonal costs associated with having to work with other people; the development of mutually respectful behaviors and trust; the costs of risk taking associated with letting go of one’s turf; and the potential embarrassment of looking bad in a group. p. 294)
4. After working in a hospital for 6 months, you have been selected to head up the team to conduct hand-washing audits on all the nursing units. Whom do you want on your team and why? I will first team up with the manager of each nursing unit, because I need to know what the general work schedule of the nurses and what they do during the working hours. Second, I will need to team up with the human resource department, I need to find out how many nurses are in the hospital, and how many people need to be assigned for the auditing task. Third, I will team up with the administration department, conduct and design program for the hand-washing audits.
5. A member of the hand-washing audit team comes to you and complains that another team member is not pulling her weight. This individual is not your employee, but she is on your team. What should you do? I will imply Social Awareness. I will pay attention to listen her complains with patience, and understand how she feels. Encourage her with compassion talks and increase her confidence. On the other hand, I will speak to the person whom she complains with, find out the reason. p. 301)
6. Define and give an example of a wicked problem in a healthcare setting. A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. (p. 297) An example of wicked problem in a healthcare setting could be the care of elderly people, where health care, social care and voluntary sector agencies need to work together effectively with informal cares.
7. List and describe five potential strategies for conflict resolution in teams. Which method is likely to be most successful if your manager likes to be involved in every decision? The five potential strategies for conflict resolution in teams are bargaining, problem solving, voting, research, and third-party mediation. Bargaining means negotiation, if the choices are equally good, then bargaining can be a good tool; if the choices aren’t equal, then it may not be a good tool. Voting is democratic, but also bears the weight of potentially taking a team to the incorrect choice. Problem solving means taking time to answer the “what if” scenarios of each alternative.
Doing more research is safe, but you may have time pressures that preclude the team from doing an in-depth study. When all else fails, third-party mediation is probably a win-win, especially if the third party is the boss. (p. 305) My manager like to use the researching method. When the conflict happen in our office, she would like to spend time to talk to different people to find out the reason and their solutions. She would also talk to the persons who cause the conflict, to see whether they have some other personal reason to cause them emotionally out of control, so that she could make the decision more humanity.
8. What are the five stages of team development? Describe each stage and how that might appear in a healthcare setting. The five stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. When teams are forming, they are getting oriented to the team goals and each other, finding out what the tasks are and who they will be working with. Then the storming begins. With storming, there is intragroup conflict; there can be attempts at dominance, passive-aggressive behavior along with information withholding, and other forms of resistance to team tasks and goals.
Peace breaks out when the storming stage passes, and team members actually begin performing the work at hand, have open dialogue with one another, and share information to accomplish the team’s goals. Winding down and adjourning brings its own emotional turbulence. Team members who may have disliked each other at the start have worked together over a long period of time and have developed respect for one another. They’ve grown to like each other as individuals and the team as a whole and become sad that they are disbanding. (p. 296)
In a healthcare setting, a surgeon meets the anesthesiologist the first time, they are in forming stage. Then they go into the storming stage and they have conflict and different opinions on the patient’s health condition. In norming stage, they start to resolve their differences, appreciate colleagues’ strengths, and respect to each other. After the storming stage and they don’t have any ethical issues, they perform the surgery for the patient. After they finish the surgery, they go into adjourning stage, they find out it’s go to work together with each other and they would like to cooperate again.
