Teamwork In Healthcare

Words: 650
Pages: 3

According to World Health Organization (WHO), an effective team is one where the team members connect and communicate with each other, and combine their reflections, proficiency, capabilities and decision-making responsibilities to improve care. There is a great deal of evidence that multidisciplinary teams improve the quality of care and lower expenses. Productive teamwork has also been shown to decrease errors and improve services for patients, especially those with chronic illnesses. Furthermore, understanding the philosophy and culture of their workplace and its effects on team dynamics and functioning will make an individual a dynamic team player. Today, patients are hardly taking care of by just one healthcare professional, but rather …show more content…
Teams can improve care at the community level, at the organizational level as well as the individual level. Patient safety is actually dependent and directly related to teamwork. For example, if a patient is at risk of falling or has already fallen in the past, it is the teamwork or coordination between the providers to prevent the patient from falling again by notifying anyone who will come in contact with the patient, sometimes even a small bracelet that said Fall Precaution can be very helpful. As a result of coordinated teamwork, MI department at SMH have come up with a new policy and have stopped transferring patients ambulatory, they either have to be in a wheelchair or starchier to move from one department to another, even if they say they can walk perfectly fine just to prevent any unanticipated event. Likewise, each department at SMH use a whiteboard to write how many days they have been “Fall Free,” and there is a quarterly reward for the whole department from the management who has been “Fall Free” for the whole quarter, this reward encourages the providers to do their best to prevent any patient from falling and it is also fundamentally important for patient safety and …show more content…
For example, Georgetown Medical Center (GMC) has a strict policy that patient nurse needs to put in all the relevant information about the patient in the Pyxis MedStation, which is a medication dispensing system that supports decentralized medication management and has various features for safety and efficiency. The system helps accurately dispense medication while supporting pharmacy workflows. Ones the nurse gets the right medication out for the patient, he/she needs to click the medication off into patient’s power chart, which is a part of EHR, the power chart has the technology to alert patient’s nurse if it is not the right time for the medication. Furthermore, the nurse needs to check patient’s name, DOB, and MR# before administering any medication. These standard procedures help the care provider from making serious, and sometimes fatal mistakes, and in turn increase patients’ satisfaction, gratification, contentment, fewer readmissions, acceptance of treatment, reduced hospitalization time and cost, enhance job security for the providers, prevent unnecessary lawsuits, enhance positive reviews, increase production, and overall safe and secure patient care. There are many more examples that can relate with respect to this subject, in fact,