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Team-Building and Communications

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Team-Building and Communications

In this scenario, you have just been hired as a consultant to the chief executive officer (CEO) of a health care organization. Your duty is to improve the management tools and practices needed to work in teams, build cross-functional teams, and facilitate collaborative decision-making.

You need to identify elements found in an effective health care work group and identify barriers to communication that may cause conflict. Also, forward communication techniques that can be used to avoid conflicts within a team where individuals hold different roles.

Address ways to improve communication among departments in an organization to avoid conflict. Finally, identify strategies that may be used to avoid recurring conflicts and ways a leader can prevent conflict within team in the organization.

Propose a quality improvement plan to present to the CEO addressing these issues.

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The solution discusses team-building and communications.

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No one can deny that working as a team makes life easier. That old cliché that "two brains are better than one" is actually true. So how do you make work teams believe that this concept works and put the steps into place to make their job easier without thinking that they are bearing another's responsibility? There is no specific method for redesign so a leader must look at the staff and specific needs of their customers. A large hospital may have different expectations than a small hospice unit or physician's office.

Communication variables in health care are usually the following; empathy, control and trust. Each types of communication have important roles especially in the area of healthcare. Empathy is often used when building a relationship between a patient, family and caregiver. This communication allows the patient and family to feel that providers and institution care about the outcome of the patient. To an extent, the provider can put themselves in place of the members of the family and have a deeper relationship that just another patient. Families and friends do sense honest empathy from caregivers and respond positively to their communication.

Control is used when there is an issue that needs to be resolved. This can be an area of misalignment with staff and mission of their facility. Control is not used often but when necessary, it is a necessary use of communication for areas such as safety or patient information. Control means that conditions are mandated by the speaker. This could be the result of a medication error or breech of patient information. These are such serious areas of care that negotiation is not an option. Stakeholders do not respond positively to these types of messages.
Trust is the most appropriate type of communication used when the stakeholders are involved. People are more willing to hear your voice when they feel that trust is a factor. Building trust is the first step to create important messages with constituents.

Information is accepted willingly instead of being forced. Trust is the best way to convey health promotion messages. Control is the least effective way to convey communication.
A sudden decrease in the staff in a unit is going to cause a disruption of the workflow. As a manager, it is important to use as many tools possible to keep the staff in the loop and inform them of any and all reductions. First, they are going to be fearful that they are one of the employees that will be asked to leave. After the last layoff, the staff will start to feel angry about working with less people on shift or in their departments. If this is not handled by a very hard-working leader, staff will continue to take their anger out on each other and over into the patient unit. Customer service will suffer due to this type of behavior (Chullen, Dunford., Angermeier, Boss, R. & Boss, A., 2010).

Talking with staff members regarding any change is essential to helping them understand the relevance of any process. Any information that is shared should be passed along to staff as soon as it is made available. At a time when a serious action such as reduction in staff is occurring or change in work alignment, there will be a lot of misinformation other than the correct information. Any change will be viewed as a threat but with team interaction this can be handled as a positive gesture. Staff may have ideas about how they can redesign their unit to make the system work. Waring & Bishop note that a lot of what we do in healthcare is wasted time. If we can identify these areas first, we can already make a major transformation in the work area (2010).

An example of a process design may be to use scenarios to allow staff to capture different ways that they can use time and space more efficiently with the people that they have to complete they work. This can ...

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