Collaborative Working in Health and Social Care: Benefits and Barriers

This presentation provides an overview of collaborative working in health and social care, emphasizing its importance in enhancing service quality and patient care. It covers professional care standards, motivational theories like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and team development stages. Various conflict management styles, including smoothing, withdrawal, and problem-solving, are analyzed, along with different conflict management approaches such as accommodating, collaborating, avoiding, competing, and compromising. The presentation also explores the benefits of positive professional relationships, such as improved care quality and timely conflict resolution, while also addressing potential disadvantages like over-reliance and hindered formal environments. The presentation concludes by highlighting the need to address barriers to collaborative working to ensure its maintenance and effectiveness. Desklib offers a variety of resources including past papers and solved assignments for students.

Collaborative Working

Contents
Slide 1:.............................................................................................................................................4
Slide 2:.............................................................................................................................................5
Slide 3:.............................................................................................................................................6
Slide 4:.............................................................................................................................................7
Slide 5:.............................................................................................................................................8
Slide 6:...........................................................................................................................................10
Slide 7:...........................................................................................................................................11
Slide 8:...........................................................................................................................................12
Slide 9:...........................................................................................................................................13
Slide 10:.........................................................................................................................................14
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................16

Slide 1:
Professional care standards outline the competent level of care provide in each phase of the
nursing process. The five professional care standards are experiencing high quality care and
support, involving individuals in decisions about their care and support, building confidence
between care givers and people in need of care and support and providing individuals high
quality environment if the premises is provided by the organization. These professional care
standards are important as they help provide bets care to every individual.

Slide 2:
Motivation
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an effective motivation theory which can be used by
organizations to improve motivation of social and health care workers. The motivational theory
provides hierarchy of needs which need to be fulfilled in order to increase motivation of
healthcare professionals. The hierarchy of needs is explained below:
 Physiological needs: This refers to the basic physiological needs including food, shelter
and water. This need can be accomplished by providing suitable remuneration to health
and social care workers so that they are able to fulfil physiological requirements.
 Safety needs: This refers to the need to seek security, order and safety. This need can be
fulfilled by providing job security to health and social care workers.
 Belonging needs: This need focuses in belonging to part of the community. This need
can be accomplished by building communication channels to help the health and social
care workers build professional community.
 Esteem needs: This need involves gaining respect and accomplishments. Developing
reward systems for hard-working health and social care professionals helps in fulfilment
of this need.

 Self-actualization needs: This need requires employees to reach maximum potential.
This need can be attained by development of career development plans which ensure
professional development of health and professional care workers to help them reach
their full potential and fulfil self-actualization needs.
This theory facilitates positive collaboration and communication between health and
social care professionals as it helps build professional community. This will enhance
collaborative practice and ensure that every patient in need of care and support gains high quality
experience by gaining collaborative care from health and social care professionals. The positive
impact of this theory is that builds professional communities and enhances motivation of
healthcare professionals to ensure maximum collaboration. The negative impact of this theory in
relation to healthcare professionals is that it is not based on empirical research and scientific
methods which suggests that the theory may not yield effective results upon implementation.
Slide 3:
Performing: Familiarity between team members leads to creation of motivated,
connected and confident team with increased cooperation. In order to maintain trust, experience
and intimacy between the group it is important to ensure that leaders emerged in this stage are
able to effectively direct the team.

 Adjourning: In this stage the team disbands after the goals of group are attained. It is
important to document efforts and outcome of team activities in this stage to understand
ways of resolving conflicts and practices for building high performing teams to build
collaborative groups in the future.
This theory facilitates creation of collaborative team which consists of health and social care
professionals as stages of team development provide guidance in ways to built high performing
teams. The positive impact of utilization of this theory in relation to health and social care is that
it can help in development of close bonds between health and social care workers. The negative
impact of this theory in content of Health and social care workers is that this theory does not
always provide predicted results. Usage of this theory to create collaborative health and social
care teams can lead to teams never transitioning to performing stage or transitioning from
storming to norming only to revert back to storming stage.
Slide 4:
Blake and Mouton developed several conflict management styles which are discussed and
analysed below: Smoothing: This style includes high cooperation and compromising with others to the
point that the individual in the conflict losses their assertiveness in the conflict. The
advantage of this style is that conflict is easily resolved due to the high cooperation of

the individual adopting this style. The disadvantage of this style is the loss of
assertiveness of individual in the conflict. This style can be improved by increasing
assertiveness to gain balanced outcome for every party in the conflict. Withdrawal: Individuals adopting this conflict management style disengage with others
in order to avoid the conflict altogether. The advantage of this style is that conflict can
be avoided temporarily to ensure smooth completion of health and social care objectives.
The disadvantage of this style is that conflicts may arise after sometime and cause more
damage to health and social care teams. This style can be improved by adding the
element of investigating root cause of the conflict while avoiding and disengaging with
parties involved in the dispute to ensure permanent resolution of the conflict.
 Problem solving: Individuals using this style understand perspectives of all parties
involved and seeks options which are beneficial to very party. The advantage of style is
that it leads to the most effective solution. The disadvantage of this style is that it is time
consuming. This style can be improved by introducing conflict management policies to
speed up conflict management process.
Slide 5:
Conflict management approaches

 A sheep approach: Accommodating- This approach involves considering needs of
others over own needs. This approach when the issue of conflict is not important or other
part is expert.
 An owl approach: Collaborating- The aim of this approach is to find solution which is
advantageous for every party and provide long-term solutions.
 Turtle approach: Avoiding- This includes avoiding the issue of conflict and works in
situations in which the other part is minor.
 Tiger approach: Competing- This approach involves focusing on one's own concerns
and disregarding concerns of others which creates a win or loose situation.
 Fox approach: Compromising- This approach requires combination of assertiveness and
cooperation and is useful in finding temporary solutions.
Examples of ineffective professional relationships: Health and social care workers asking gifts
from clients is an example of ineffective professional relationships. Another example is low trust
between nursing staff and community outreach workers. It is essential to enhance such
relationships in order to provide quality care to service users. Ineffective professional
relationships have negative impact on the service user as they can lead to deceased coordination
between healthcare professionals.
Comparison and contrast of conflict management practices: Accommodating is the main conflict
management practice used in health and social care industry which involves prioritizing others
needs over one's own. In comparison collaboration is another effective conflict management
practice which leads to consideration of interest of every individual related in the conflict.

Slide 6:
In addition to this, positive professional relationship between health and social care workers
helps create trustworthy environment in which service users receive high quality care.
Expansion of aims of collaborative working
 Providing high quality care and support experience; This standard can be
accomplished with the help of collaborative working as every individual will work for the
interest of the service user.
 Involving service users in decisions about their care and support: Collaborative
working ensures that every decision made by health and social care worker is completed
after involving service user in decision making.
 Making the consumer confidence: Collaborative working crates trustworthy
relationship between health and social care professionals an service users which builds
their confidence in the organization offering care and support.
 Providing high quality environment: Collaborative practice assists in creation og high
quality environment for service users.
Exploring the reasons of identification of collaborative working to improve services
Collaborative practice between health and social care workers improves various aspects
of providing high quality services to service users. This includes aspects such as complying with

legislations. This is because social care professionals assist in ensuring compliance with specific
legislations. In addition to this advocacy and financial management is also assisted by
collaborative working.
The most effective method of overcoming the barrier of fear based culture is to create an open
workplace environment which health and social care workers can communicate with each other.
The way of eliminating barrier of poor employee profiling is to develop specific job descriptions
which assist in recruitment of employees which are able to ensure collaborative working.
Slide 7:

Slide 8:
In addition to this, another advantage of development of professional relationship between
various members of health and social care industries is that it ensures timely resolutions of
conflicts to provide best care and support to service users.
Slide 9: