Collaborative Working in Health and Social Care: Barriers and Benefits

HCPD 6056
Collaborative Working in Health and Social Care
E-Portfolio for Summative Assignment Task
Part One- Essay (2000 words)
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LO1 Demonstrate a critical understanding of current definitions of collaborative
working in health and social care settings
LO2 Critically discuss how teams form and function and identify some of the barriers
to effective collaborative working
Consider the following:
Definitions of collaborative working
Critique of these definitions using other sources of literature
Definition of team-working
Tuckman's theory
Critique of Tuckman using other theories
Discussion of barriers to collaboration
Overcoming the barriers to collaboration
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The collaboration is a kind of approach that requires immense groups to come
together in order to share their knowledge and ideas related to a particular area for
further improvements and innovations. This report will describe the concept of
collaborative working in health and social care along with some barriers that limits the
effective collaboration working.
1. Understanding of collaborative working in health and social care settings
Collaboration is connected through the modernisation of the health and social
care systems that have taken place since the end of 20th century. The concept of
collaboration involves multiple people who are interacting with each other in order to
achieve a communal particular goal (Ramanuj and Pincus, 2019). It is a kind of
ongoing and active partnership among professionals and institutions with diverse
backgrounds and mandates who work together to provide services. It is an effective,
efficient and satisfying way to offer health care services within the society. It is a
collection of interdependent professionals who are structured in collective way to act
together towards patient's care requirements. It is highly important for the people to
build trust factor among their patients, tolerance and self awareness within themselves
in order to work effectively for the health and social care functions specially when
working in collaborative groups. The collaboration among both i.e. health worker and
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social worker are important as both serves diversified purposes in order to provide
their services to the patients. For instance, a doctor or physician is able to provide
treatment in better ways but a social worker plays a vital role serving as an advocate
or legal guide in order to bring attention towards social justice issues that may be
overlooked by other team members while working as a team (Friesen and Andersen,
2019)
The benefits of collaborative working in health and social care settings
includes that with the help of various people with different kind of mindset, each
individual is able to bring their individual expertise while working in a group. Such
kind of practices ensures that the problems are addressed from all angles in most
appropriate manner and there are no blind spots have been vacant while handling the
challenges. It is a well known construct that social work is highly challenging in
nature. The patients can easily rely on the functioning of the team because of the
involvement of large number of people. The partners of the group are also able to
access different tools and techniques in order to provide their services to numerous
patients at similar time duration. Pooling of resources can able to minimise the costs
for individuals and make sure that the team are working appropriately. Rules and
procedures are fewer and easier to navigate with team members (Ryberg and et.al.,
2020). This practice encourage patient engagement as collaboration among health care
teams may improve patient education along with behavioural changes such as
information seeking and efficient delivery of information patient involvement in
decision making and patient participation in self care.
On the other hand there are few challenges that have been faced by teams
while promoting collaboration practices. Team leaders have to manage the these
diverse interests and take advantage on the strengths of the team arrangements. These
challenges have been apply in health care as well as social care where the professional
disciplines that are involved have different roles, responsibilities, education, authority
prestige, pay, etc. in order to support collaborative structure (Chou, 2020). The
physical and organizational environment in which the team operates can impact the
nature of collaborative interactions. In the field of nursing collaboration indicates that
collaboration can be facilitate by designing immersive work attributes that create a
sense of team cohesion, support physical activities undertaken by the team mates and
improve the time and space considerations in promoting interactions among staff
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members. In order to do successful collaborations within social and healthcare
settings there are certain factors that limits the advantages of doing it in terms of
fulfilling the tasks or providing services to the patients. It includes personalities of
different people are diverse in nature, feeling of competitiveness among the partners
of the team, lack of information along with experiences, lack of resources specifically
at the time of taking decisions, cultural mismatch, lack of consistency and clarity of
roles and responsibilities, etc. (Chambers and Schmid, 2019).
In order to overcome from such kind of challenges, the collaborative teams
have to foster a climate that encourages partnership while working with external
practitioners or other people within a group. Creation of balance in collaborative
relationships are highly recommended as the excessive emerging can be unproductive
in nature. Apart from this, the situation under which the collaboration has been
utilised is also become a part of major concern although collaboration is best utilised
in order to resolve issues related to imperfect, diversified and constantly changing
solutions (Restall and Egan, 2021). However, collaboration is not consistently good
nor pervasively beneficial nor it is always required in every situation. Thus, the
increasing complexity in health care and social care system along with patients
conditions, the number of problems faced by team members enhances the requirement
of collaboration within their efforts.
2. The ways in which teams form and function in collaborative manner along with
certain barriers to effective collaborative working
It has been understood from above description that collaborative working is
extremely important and valuable in order to fulfil various ways. This leads towards
the question that the ways in which one can able to create and support collaborative
teams. Even after changes within the organizational structures are enhanced their
focus on the collaboration of activities between professionals that are practising in
health care teams. The managers and decision makers implementing such
reorganizations that effectively encourage the development of collaborative
relationship within inter-professional teams. With the help of proper and common
vision and strategies, team are able to find clarity and directions as a united group that
values the diversity among the members (née Blackwell and et.al., 2017). Procedures
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