Module Three: Building Better Teams

EM Leaders - Building Better Teams (icon).png

A team is a group of people with a variety of individual skills and knowledge who come together to work towards a specific goal or purpose. They can be short-lived and specific, such as a cardiac arrest team, or enduring, covering a range of purposes such as a Consultant team. Good teamwork in healthcare has been shown to improve patient outcomes, reduce medical errors, improve morale and reduce staff sickness rates.

Successful teamwork can be difficult to navigate in healthcare due to conflict over what the primary purpose of the team is. Consider a typical day at work. Colleagues may have different priorities on the shop floor. Some may focus on reducing the wait to be seen, others on avoiding admissions, others on getting patients on the bed list as soon as possible, others on making a firm diagnosis and others on education and training. In Emergency Medicine, specific patient outcomes can be difficult to define and providing excellent quality care for all may be limited by available resources. Our individual aims are also likely to change depending on what stage we are in our training. Junior colleagues are keen to pin down a patient’s diagnosis as this is important for their medical knowledge and confidence, whereas a Consultant may seem more interested in avoiding overcrowding due to a need to maintain overall patient safety.

Building effective teams is a skill that can be learnt and practised. By negotiating and defining goals from the outset, we are likely to build mutual trust. Listening to the views of others and communicating our own views effectively means that the team is more likely to reach its goal. Have a look at this blog from the Harvard Business Review that discusses the complexities of working in teams in the digital age and what we can do to improve team dynamics…

Building Better Teams (blog)