Teamwork in Healthcare Nursing: Importance, Barriers & Development

This essay discusses the critical role of teamwork in healthcare nursing, emphasizing its impact on patient satisfaction, safety, and quality of care. It defines interdisciplinary teamwork and highlights the importance of effective leadership in maintaining team stability and promoting open communication. The essay explores the benefits of teamwork, such as reduced medication errors and decreased nurse burnout, and identifies facilitators like effective leadership, a healthy workplace culture, and high emotional intelligence among team members. Furthermore, it addresses barriers to teamwork, including poor communication, overwork, and power struggles. The essay concludes with recommendations for developing effective teamwork, focusing on improving communication skills, adaptability, and clarity of roles, emphasizing the need for team members to build trust and engage in informal interactions. Desklib provides access to this essay and many other solved assignments.

Running head: TEAMWORK IN HEALTHCARE NURSING:
TEAMWORK IN HEALTHCARE NURSING:
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Teamwork in healthcare nursing:
Interdisciplinary teamwork is one of the most efficient aspects of delivering healthcare to
patients that ensure not only patient satisfaction but also ensures safe and quality care of the
patients. It may be defined as the two or more people who can interact interdependently with
each other to serve a common purpose (Kalisch et al., 2015). The nursing professionals in a team
are seen to work towards a measurable goal that in turn benefits from effective leadership.
Effective leadership in teamwork helps to maintain stability in the team while encouraging
honest discussion about the needs and requirements of the patients, effective feedback sharing
within the professionals and working collaboratively in problem solving. This assignment will
show importance of teamwork in nursing, facilitators of effective teamwork in nursing. Barriers
to teamwork and recommendations to develop teamwork.
Importance of teamwork:
In the present generation, clinical care is becoming complex day by day. With the
advancement of the medical and scientific inventions in the present generation, the life
expectancy of people had increased. However, the older population although living longer lives
are going through poor quality of their lives due to a number of chronic disorders that are
occurring to them as co morbid disorders (Orr, 2017). Treatments of such complex care requires
teamwork among the nurses as only one nurse cannot care for all the disorders of the patients
with the same affectivity as more number of nurses can result by their collaborative output on the
health of the patients. Better the teamwork among the healthcare nurses, the patient would
achieve higher quality of care and this would include patient satisfaction and patient recovery.

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Many other benefits are associated with effective teamwork among the nurses.
Researchers have found out that when nursing professionals work together, there is reduction in
the number of medication errors and reduction in waiting times of the patients (Yi, 2016). This
would increase patient safety. It also helps in reduction of the burnouts among the nursing
professionals. Effective coordination helps in reduction of the emotional pressures and work
burdens on the nurses and help in equal distribution among the members. This reduces excessive
work burden on some and helps in equal distribution of the burden among many thereby
preventing occupational health hazard.
Facilitators of effective teamwork in nursing:
Effective leadership:
Effective leadership is one of the most important aspects of a successful teamwork in nursing.
Often the nursing professionals may face various types of issues that affect collaborative work
output in the healthcare systems. The main stakeholder who faces a loss and goes through
suffering is the patient. Therefore, the most important activity of a leader in a team is to keep the
team accountable (Weller, Boyd & Cumin, 2014). Many members of a team are highly proactive
while there are many members who conceal themselves with the idea that their work would be
done by others. The leader of the nurses take the duty of effective monitoring and evaluation and
ensures that work is equally shared by all so that chances of burn outs become less. They are also
seen to empower the team members by making them motivate to work beyond their potentials.
They also help to simplify the goals and helps by streamlining the decision making process. They
also take part in orientation and education of the embers so that they can work with correct
behavior and attitude in teams (Tofil et al., 2014). They also take part in nurturing as well as

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encouragement. They also help in assessment as well as correction of the different improper
decisions, activities or skills undertaken by the nurses. Moreover, many nurses may go through
different stressful phases emotionally and mentally. Therefore, they take part in the listening and
counseling nursing professionals helping them to maintain unity and bonding in teamwork. They
also help in establishing group emphasis.
Healthy workplace:
Organizational culture has great contribution to the development of the teamwork with the
workplace. The organization who promotes working in teams are found to achieve higher patient
satisfaction and better reputation than those organizations who do not provide importance to it.
Organizations who try to influence nurses to work in team mainly help the nurses in the end by
reducing the physical and mental burden of the work and these have positive outcomes
(Valentine et al., 2015). The nurses feel that their organization cares for them and hence
participates in effective teamwork. Moreover, organizational culture who promotes meeting of
feedback sharing sessions among the teams are seen to provide best collaborative output as it is
believed that this reduces power struggles and conflicts and blames games. Therefore effective
teamwork development is also a contribution of developed organizational culture among many
different teams.
Level of emotional intelligence:
Emotional intelligence possessed by an individual would in turn decide how well the individuals
would be participating as an effective team member. Emotional intelligence is mainly comprised
of five important factors. These are self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy as well
as motivation (Horseley et al., 2016). Those who have high level of emotional intelligence can

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actively socialize with others in the team, empathize with the situations, motivate oneself and the
others and self aware of their own emotions and can regulate their emotions effectively. This in
turn results in the development of stronger bonds with the other members as the positive aspects
of the nurses are well perceived by the other members. In this way, people with higher emotional
intelligence become dearer to the other members. Therefore when all the members are able to
possess high level of emotional intelligence, strong team bonding can be developed.
Barriers to effective teamwork:
Poor communication:
Ineffective communication in the healthcare centers is a barrier that leads to poor teamwork.
Many of the nursing professionals do not have proper verbal communication skills. Some may
have impatient listening skill, fast speaking issue, improper feedback giving and receiving skills
and many others (Endacott et al., 2015). All these may impacts sharing and documentation of
information during delegation or during communication about patient health. Non-verbal
communication skills like improper eye contact, gesture, body language, voice, tone, pitch and
others may affect the receiver and this may result in development of negative feeling among the
nursing members. This affects teamwork.
Over work:
With the increasing advancement in medical science, the population has increased as more
people are living for longer days. However, their quality of lives has not developed and they are
living with co-morbidities. Therefore, the number of patients seeking care has also increased
largely. As a result, nursing professionals are trying to serve more number of individuals within
the fixed set of time than they used to attend earlier (Carson et al., 2018). Therefore, they get

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tired of fulfilling the needs of all patients and caring for them without taking any breaks due to
large demand. They become over worked that result in physical and mental issues. Therefore,
they really get no time to interact with others in the team and thereby cannot share their
emotional suffering and turmoil. These affect the formation of bonding and relations and trusts
are not formed easily. Therefore, Overwork may result in the formation of effective team and
application of proper teamwork.
Power struggles:
Often different types of power struggles are seen among the nurses that prevent effective
teamwork. In many cases, it is found that the junior nurses do not get proper support from the
senior nurses and believes that the senior nurses suffer from superiority complex. Again, on the
other hand, it is found that the senior nurses state that the junior nurses do not provide them
respect and do not ask for suggestions, as they believe that they are knowledgeable and skillful
enough. Therefore, a series of blame games often arise in the organizations where none of the
members wants to collaborate with each other and therefore indulge in blame games (Martin et
al. 2015). Therefore, it results in creation of a barrier in teamwork and teams cannot perform
well resulting in medication errors, administration errors, communication errors and many
others.
Recommendations to develop effective teamwork:
The first recommendation would be to develop effective communication skills. Once the
members develop effective communication skills, they would be able to share feedbacks about
each other, engage in informal talks with each other’s, solve their misunderstandings, overcome
conflicts and many others. When transparency is developed among the team members through

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effective communication, bonding will be developed and this will help in developing effective
teamwork.
The second recommendation is that every nursing professional should be adaptable. Often
various types of situations may arise within the teams. One member may get ill and may not
come to shift. In such situation, nurses should take the responsibility with the focus on the bigger
picture of the goal and helping the team by performing the responsibilities of the absent member
(Logan et al., 2018). Many nurses in the team may not be well skilled. Therefore, the
professionals should help such nurses to develop the skills and treat the patient at the same time
as an example. This is mainly called adaptability of the situation. Every nursing professional
should develop this trait as this is one of the most important trait that helps in effective
teamwork.
The third recommendation would be knowing the plan and sticking with it. Every of the
healthcare member should make sure that they known their respective roles and if not known,
then should be clarified with the leaders. When each of the members has clear idea about their
own roles and are also aware of the bigger goal and mission, teamwork become much easier
(alSayah et al., 2014). When each of the members performs their individual duty at the same
timework collaboratively with each, best teamwork would be achieved.
The fourth recommendation would be getting to know about the team members. Initiatives
should be taken by which all the members would be engaging in informal conversations, going
for informal outings, participate in fun activities and many others. Knowing them as a person
enhances trust and bonding which are two important goals of teamwork.

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References:
Al Sayah, F., Szafran, O., Robertson, S., Bell, N. R., & Williams, B. (2014). Nursing
perspectives on factors influencing interdisciplinary teamwork in the Canadian primary
care setting. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 23(19-20), 2968-2979.
Carson, O. M., Laird, E. A., Reid, B. B., Deeny, P. G., & McGarvey, H. E. (2018). Enhancing
teamwork using a creativity-focussed learning intervention for undergraduate nursing
students-A pilot study. Nurse education in practice, 30, 20-26.
Endacott, R., Bogossian, F. E., Cooper, S. J., Forbes, H., Kain, V. J., Young, S. C., ... &
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Logan, T. R., & Michael Malone, D. (2018). Nurses’ perceptions of teamwork and workplace
bullying. Journal of nursing management.

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