Introduction
Teamwork and collaboration in professional health care and nursing are regarded as the paramount elements in ensuring positive health outcomes in patients and increasing the quality of health care delivery. It is possible to collectively consider such issues as problem-solving, decision-making, and goal-setting. Also, teamwork allows knowledge and skills sharing that, in turn, inevitably leads to the enhanced awareness of all the staff members engaged in the collaboration of the current tendencies, the most critical points, and relevant health care practices (Hood, 2014). Therefore, a successful collaboration between health care professionals and, in particular, nurses, improves health care quality.
Shared Governance as a Key Component of Collaboration
To begin with, it is necessary to empower nurses to participate in the decision-making process, thus allowing them to connect it to their practice. For this purpose, institutional nursing committees may serve as a tool for the initiation of the open dialogue between the interested parties, during which every member will have the opportunity to express his or her ideas and views to achieve the collective decision-making (Hood, 2014). The subdivision of these committees may significantly improve the engagement of nurse practitioners, preventing their potential isolation. The effective collaboration can also be promoted using multidisciplinary meetings and comprehensive interaction. However, there is the risk of team members’ excess merging and the subsequent stagnation that is characterized by the inability to share knowledge and acquire it from the other teams. The identified obstacle may be either prevented or addressed with the help of the related training and coaching, the expected outcome of which is collaboration learning.
Constructive Skills of Conflict-Solving as a Balancer of Collaboration
The self-centered approach used by physicians and nurses to evaluate their skills and the overall performance seems to be useful to transform the negative perceptions into positive ones. To practice conflict resolution, it is also possible to learn to detect, assess, and accept cognitive diversity and identify the strengths and weaknesses of team members (Fewster-Thuente, 2015). The creative thinking elements can be used to reach the agreement regarding different attitudes on the given topic. While establishing adequate communication, listening and observation techniques may serve as beneficial tools to understand others and resolve conflicts (Fewster-Thuente, 2015). In some cases, the compromise may be achieved through negotiations and clear statements of goals and attitudes, both within the team and outside it.
The introduction of the shared power system, focusing on the informal hierarchy, promotes reliance on the power of data, benevolence, and knowledge. Such a system will contribute to conflict-solving due to its emphasis on relationships between team members. Both conceptual and contextual examinations of issues will allow considering the broader perspectives of conflict resolution. Ultimately, time management implementation will also promote effective ideas to address the complicated situations in the practice of nurses and physicians. In particular, knowledge of time management may simplify and accelerate the process of conflict resolution, be it the informal conversation or formal communication.
Conclusion
To conclude, it should be emphasized that teamwork and collaboration require the development of interpersonal skills and training based on organizational atmosphere analysis to provide the most effective learning of conflict resolution strategies. In effect, successful collaboration and teamwork allow establishing trustful relationships between team members, thus improving collective goal-setting, decision-making, and conflict resolution that, in their turn, will increase the quality of health care delivery.
References
Fewster-Thuente, L. (2015). Working together toward a common goal: A grounded theory of nurse physician collaboration. MEDSURG Nursing, 24(5), 356-362.
Hood, L. J. (2014). Leddy & Pepper’s conceptual bases of professional nursing (8th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.