The Place of Teamwork and Collaboration in a Work Environment

Teamwork and collaboration are essential skills needed as a medical radiation professional to provide adequate and safe healthcare for patients. Hence, for Foundations of Professional Practice, I had an assignment to create a poster with five other members from three different streams of radiation science. This assignment was used to help medical radiation students understand the importance of teamwork, collaboration and the challenges that occur when working as a group. Hence, in this evaluation essay on teamwork and collaboration I will be exploring the significance of how these aspect are needed to complete a well informed and presented poster, as well as in a work environment. I will also be discussing what I learnt and challenges I experienced when working in a group.

Discussion

Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) in health care occurs when two or more professionals work together to produce a team-based patient care.By collaborating it has been shown that it provides benefits to health care providers, reduces extra work and increases job satisfaction. This is because each health care professional has their own capability and set of skills. When brought together in a team, this helps efficiently share responsibility for problem-solving and decision making when dealing with patients. Therefore, in this assignment, by working with other students from different streams I was able to learn more about their profession. It also allowed every member to incorporate each of their individual skills such as leadership and listening to create a poster.

For the poster assignment, in my group there were two members including me from the nuclear medicine stream and four other members from the medical imaging stream. When working as a group I found it hard at first as there was a lack of communication between members. Also due to the coronavirus, my group was unable to meet hence had to rely on online communication. I found that communicating online is not as effective as it would have been face-to-face. This is because we were not able to sit as a group and talk about what each member had to do. As in a journal Kemp and Grieve reports that face-to-face is much more engaging and has an immediate feedback response rather than communicating online. However, we were able to overcome this by creating a shared google document where each member was able to contribute their section of work. I also found that by just messaging it was really hard to communicate, but once my group used ultra collaborate to talk with one another we were able to efficiently get our poster done faster. As everyone was able to complete their work on time it is seen that there was a clear role for each student, that there was trust and confidence and that we were able to overcome problems. Hence, we were able to complete the poster.

Conclusion

Overall, from this assignment I learnt that communication is very important to get work done. That messaging online made it quite hard to communicate what each member wanted to say. However, I found that if everyone contributed, completed their work on time and made an effort to communicate using facebook and ultra collaborate we were able to complete the poster.

Reference

• Bosch, B., & Mansell, H. (2015). Interprofessional collaboration in health care: Lessons to be learned from competitive sports. Canadian pharmacists journal : CPJ = Revue des pharmaciens du Canada : RPC, 148(4), 176–179. https://doi.org/10.1177/1715163515588106
• Busari, J. O., Moll, F. M., & Duits, A. J. (2017). Understanding the impact of interprofessional collaboration on the quality of care: a case report from a small-scale resource limited health care environment. Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare, 10, 227–234. https://doi.org/10.2147/JMDH.S140042
• Green, B. N., & Johnson, C. D. (2015). Interprofessional collaboration in research, education, and clinical practice: working together for a better future. The Journal of chiropractic education, 29(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.7899/JCE-14-36
• Kemp, N., & Grieve, R. (2014). Face-to-face or face-to-screen? Undergraduates' opinions and test performance in classroom vs. online learning. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1278. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01278