How to Build an Effective Team in a Health Care Setting — Dia Nichols
Healthcare leaders adopt different practices to form effective healthcare provider teams. These leaders play an important role in enhancing team members’ productivity as well as patient outcomes. For example, contemporary leaders understand the significant impact of leading by example. They are aware that how they conduct themselves influences their team-members behavior as well. Therefore, through their actions, they encourage collaboration and foster mutual respect amongst team members which ultimately helps them deliver quality patient outcomes.
With over 20 years of leadership experience in the healthcare sector, I greatly resonated with an article I recently read titled “How to Build an Effective Team in a Health Care Setting”. The article describes the different strategies employed by healthcare leaders for the growth of team members, whilst meeting the caregiving objectives.
Below are the various strategies leaders are recommended to adopt to build an effective team in a healthcare setting -
- A New Focus on Teamwork
The medical community has come to understand that collaboration is key to delivering quality service with minimum error. Without leaders employing team-building strategies, there is a lot of scope for miscommunication and conflict. For this, developing solidarity amongst team members is essential. Over time, team members develop a rapport and mutual trust amongst each other which improves performance.
“Leaders enforce a patient satisfaction culture with respect and empathy, empowering staff members to feel a real desire to meet company objectives… Finally, by continually encouraging advancement, leaders embolden employees to adopt new policies and ideas as a unified group.”
2. Team-oriented Goal Setting
To deliver quality outcomes, a collaborative effort is required among patients, service providers, care providers, and family members. “While caregiving objectives seem evident, without group consensus and documented formalization, an organization is unlikely to produce desired outcomes. Team leaders clearly establish objectives and accountability to ensure organizational productivity.”
3. Set the Bar
Quantifiable goals help organizations “reduce errors, service delivery time and wasted resources, while concurrently increasing patient satisfaction”. This enhances employees’ focus and commitment and makes sure resources are efficiently allocated. Additionally, having such goals helps identify an employee’s productivity, strengths, and weaknesses.
“Maximizing human capital is the key to delivering optimal healthcare services. Providing growth opportunities is a secondary, however critical, objective. Healthcare leaders improve team performance by establishing growth expectations…. Therefore, leaders use empirical evidence to manage employee skill sets throughout their entire organizational career cycle.”
4. Learned Communication Skills
Several medical errors stem from miscommunication. To prevent these, leaders practice and teach effective communication strategies to their team members. “Effective communication reduces these occurrences and increases positive patient outcomes. Caregiving organizations have experienced markedly improved patient outcomes after establishing formal guidelines for communicating patient information. Healthcare leaders establish training and implementation of these policies to help team members deliver effective services.” Also, these strategies help caregivers effectively communicate with their clients.
5. Encouraging Respect and Trust
Healthcare leaders practice and promote respect and trust amongst team members and interactions with clients. This helps build a rapport with the client and build trust to produce positive results. “Allowing clients and peers to voice opinions and ideas first allows employees to build trust by demonstrating authentic empathy. Mutual empathy and true understanding help stakeholders work together to meet common objectives, which decisively leads to positive patient outcomes… Therefore, healthcare leaders educate employees in critical listening skills.”
6. Determining, Identifying, and Assigning Specific Roles
Leaders recognize that there are professionals from different medical disciplines in inter-departmental teams, and teach team members to value what every member offers. Leaders also foster understanding amongst members by creating opportunities for employees to work with other discipline members. This helps develop professional awareness.
Leaders also decipher the specific roles of team members for a given client. This helps the team members to address clients’ cultural, spiritual, and emotional necessities.
You can read the original article here.
