Introduction
Teamwork in health care is essential for patient safety, efficiency in service delivery and for efficient coordination among health officers. Working together in a conducive environment with supportive colleagues brings with it a lot of benefits. Teamwork has helped achieve good levels of service delivery to patients because of various reasons: improved systems and specialization of health officers, continued existence of co-morbidities, advanced procedures of resource allocation and improvement in managerial services.
However, teamwork greatly depends on tasks needed to be performed, with regard to time and place (Valentine, 2015). The fact that health officers may have special skills and knowledge relating to the task at hand, makes coming together very important in order to realize the expected outcome, success. In respect to this, a team must always have a leader, someone who would control ideas and maintain order among the members. For a team to be effective, members must be flexible and ready to change and adapt to changing conditions. For this reason, members should have a positive attitude and trust towards each other. For instance, if one identifies areas of weakness in the team, others will comfortably draft policies for improvement and reallocation of resources would occur so that the problem is solved.
On the other hand, team work faces several challenges such as workforce shortages, safe working hours’ initiatives and increasing cases of chronic disease prevalence (Valentine,2015). The number of health care officers matters a lot when it comes to quality service delivery and patient safety. This will force the available staff to divide responsibilities amongst themselves so as to attend to all patients. As a result, the quality of health care delivery will go down and patient safety will be compromised.
Reference
Valentine, M. A., Nembhard, I. M., & Edmondson, A. C. (2015). Measuring teamwork in health care settings: a review of survey instruments. Medical Care, 53(4), e16-e30.