Teamwork is essential to improving the quality of patient care and reducing medical errors and injuries. But how does teamwork really function? And what are the barriers that sometimes prevent smart, well-intentioned people from building and sustaining effective teams? Collaborative Caring takes an unusual approach to the topic of teamwork. Editors Suzanne Gordon, Dr. David L. Feldman, and Dr. Michael Leonard have gathered fifty engaging first-person narratives provided by people from various health care professions. Each story vividly portrays a different dimension of teamwork, capturing the complexity-and sometimes messiness-of moving from theory to practice when it comes to creating genuine teams in health care. The stories help us understand what it means to be a team leader and an assertive team member. They vividly depict how patients are left out of or included on the team and what it means to bring teamwork training into a particular workplace.
Exploring issues like psychological safety, patient advocacy, barriers to teamwork, and the kinds of institutional and organizational efforts that remove such barriers, the health care professionals who speak in this book ultimately have one consistent message: teamwork makes patient care safer and health care careers more satisfying. These stories are an invaluable tool for those moving toward genuine interprofessional and intraprofessional teamwork.
Industry Reviews
"Collaborative Caring includes an examination of interprofessional practice, teamwork, and collaborative practice or collaborative caring. By using narratives and reflections that relate to real events in health care, this book discusses the contemporary concept of working together in teams... team. This publication is very relevant in the context of current health systems and is effective to stimulate reflection on action as individuals and teams work together toward common goals while at times taking a different approach."-Susanne Murphy,Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy(2016) "Collaborative Caring makes a unique contribution in the scope and breadth of teamwork it considers. It is an important book."-Audrey Lyndon, PhD, RNC, FAAN, University of California San Francisco "Collaborative Caring tells the human side of health care through a clever collection of frank essays and personal accounts on teamwork. While it candidly acknowledges the personal, cultural, and political tribulations faced by health care teams everyday, it also inspires perseverance and fortitude by arming readers with stories that can be retold to drive meaningful teamwork in their own workplace."-John Chuo, MD, MS, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania "Teamwork is the neglected part of medical training and the new frontier for the reliable delivery of quality care. It is not enough to know what to do; providers need to be able to deliver that knowledge reliably-and that takes teamwork. This book emphasizes the essential elements of true teamwork: actions coordinated by a shared goal, a shared mental model of the situation, crossmonitoring, a flat hierarchy, mutual respect, and trust. If your operating room team or patient care team does not have these characteristics, this book is for you."-John R. Clarke, MD, Professor of Surgery, Drexel University; Clinical Director for Patient Safety and Quality Initiatives, ECRI Institute; Clinical Director, Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority
