Collaborative Nursing: Recommendations for Team Charter and Communication Strategies

The delivery of high quality and safe health care service is facilitated in a clinical setting by the collaboration and contribution of multi-professional team. The purpose of this report to provide recommendations for team charter to support establishing ground rules and expectation and propose communication and collaboration strategies to effective collaboration between multi-professional team.

Running head: COLLABORATIVE NURSING
Collaborative nursing
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Introduction:
The delivery of high quality and safe health care service is facilitated in a clinical setting
by the collaboration and contribution of multi-professional team. To recognize the goal of
effective and patient-centered health care delivery, effective team work and proper collaboration
is considered a necessary part of health care practice (Babiker et al., 2014) In response to the
launch of an inter-professional team that will be working on challenging cases, the purpose of
this report to provide recommendations for team charter to support establishing ground rules and
expectation and propose communication and collaboration strategies to effective collaboration
between multi-professional team.
Team charter recommendation:
Since team members from different specialization are going to work as inter-professional
team, it is necessary to clarify all team members regarding ground rules and expectations to
minimize conflicts, difference in expectation and reduce medical errors. The following team
charter recommendation is proposed for the efficiency of the team:
 It is necessary to establish ground rules and expectations for the multi-professional team
by making all members very clear about their own role and the expectation and standards
of care needed while handling critical cases. To help every member contribute equally to
team work, establishing role clarity is essential. This will increase the likelihood of team
success and each member’s satisfaction with the work too (Bosch & Mansell, 2015). In
addition, setting performance standards and expectations for patient safety is necessary so
that uniformity and consistency of performance can be maintained. The leader of the

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team can establish performance norms and frame expectations that emphasize on patient
safety (Balki et al., 2017). For example, practice guidelines related to patient safety can
be distributed and each member can be educated about their role in patient safety.
 When members from different specialization will come together to work as a multi-
professional team, there are high chances of conflict because of lack of trust and differences
in personality and expectations of each team members. For example, difference in opinion
may exist regarding handling any patient case. Other sources of team conflict may include
role boundary issue, scope of practice and accountability issues. Such issues may deteriorate
team performance and lead to loosely coordinated team relationship. This eventually will
have an impact on the outcome of patient (Bosch & Mansell, 2015). Hence, the best conflict
resolution strategies for multiprofessional team include developing team resolution protocols
and leadership interventions to resolve conflict. For instance, team resolution protocols can
instruct member regarding focusing on problem solving and working with shared goals.
Leaders can also encourage members to develop values of respect and humility and learn to
negotiate. Open communication is also the best step to resolve conflict (Brown et al., 2011).
 One of the threats to the efficiency of the new multi-professional team includes the team
leadership issue. For instance, if ideal leader is not present in the team, gap in collaboration
and team efficiency may exist. It can have an impact on process quality and patient safety too
(McFadden, Stock & Gowen III, 2015). Hence, leadership strategy is crucial to achieve a
competitive age. To choose the member who will lead the team, the preference should be
given to individuals who possess leadership competencies like experience in clinical practice,
good management attributes, commitment to improve health of population and accepting
rules, regulations and code of conducts. For example, such individuals should have a sense of

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mission, ability to influence people, implement creative decision making to promote team
performance and develop positive work environment (Nancarrow et al., 2013). Leaders with
such quality are essential to effectively handle critical patient cases as well as team conflict
related issues. If the chosen leader is found to be ineffective, then they can be given
opportunities for development by analysis of development needs in individual leaders. This
can be done by formal or informal skill gap analysis.
Communication and collaboration strategies:
For the success of the new multi-professional team, the main priority will be implementing
best practices for effective communication and inter-professional collaboration between team
members. The following are the recommendations for the best practices related to effective inter-
professional collaboration in multi-professional team:
 The best practice for inter-professional collaboration is establishing a common
communication and collaboration framework. This is necessary to enter into respectful
collaborative communication and resolve conflicts. This may be done by the use of
evidence based tools like SBAR (Situation-background-assessment-recommendation)
which can increased both inter-professional competence of team members as well as
promote attitude towards timely communication between team. The key actions
mentioned in the SBAR tool allows for a common communication structure those health
care professional needs to follow for communicating and sharing information with the
team. It can help team members to systematically organize the information and suggest
actions to other team members during handover or other meeting. Such move can have
positive implications on patient care and safety (Kostoff et al., 2016). Various types of

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communication technologies such as electronic messaging, telephone, video-
conferencing and emails can be used for communication between multi-professional
team. Different types of communication technology can close the gap in practice setting
and increase the pace of information sharing and taking timely response for patients
(Shrader et al., 2016).
 Different types of communication tools like e-mails, voice mail and face-to-face
conversation can be used for collaboration between multiple health care team. The
effectiveness of each of them is seen in different situations. Face-to-face communication
is effective when there is a need for team meeting or team orientation on important
priority of the day or related to team hurdle before handling critical task. Such type of
communication adds value to communication and eliminate misunderstandings too.
However, face-to-face communication becomes ineffective when the team is large or
when there is high work pressure. It also depends on the attentiveness of listeners too. In
contrast, e-mail and voices mails are effective to share important detail about patient and
daily work procedure. The advantage of this tool is that it is the most convenient way to
share health information and daily work priorities to team members. However, the
disadvantage is that inappropriate emails sometimes increase risk of miscommunication
and diagnostics errors too. It is necessary to recognize the best communication tools
based on analysis of situations to promote productive team work (Okuyama, Wagner &
Bijnen, 2014).
Conclusion:

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The above recommendations summarized approach needed to establish a successful inter-
professional team and promote effective communication between team members. Standards of
care, expected professional performance and parameters of quality care and patient safety should
be established based on demand of work and organizational rules and regulation to facilitate the
success of the team. Communication is also an important pillar of team efficiency and there is a
need to incorporate best communication tool for communication in various situations.

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