NURS 8302 Discussion Strategies for Building Effective Teams Week 7 Discussion

NURS 8302 Discussion Strategies for Building Effective Teams Week 7 Discussion

Creating a team to address quality issues is a great way to improve quality in an organization. Having a team address issues as opposed to an individual allows more creative thinking, sharing the workload, and efficient use of resources (U.S. Department of Healthcare and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration, n.d.). A strategy that could be used for building effective teams would be setting ground rules. This strategy would include a clear, written reason for why the team is created and what the aim of the team is. This strategy would also clarify what should and should not be discussed in team meetings. Having agreed upon ground rules can help a team stay focused and can make them more effective because they have clear goals and anyone can speak up when the ground rules are being violated for whatever reason (U.S. Department of Healthcare and Human Services Health Resources and Service Administration, n.d.). This strategy would be particularly effective in my healthcare organization because meetings can tend to go every which way and the real purpose of the meeting can get easily lost through other complaints or tasks that are trying to be accomplished that do not relate to the team meeting goal.

When making a team the stakeholders should have some level of buy in so that they are committed to making the appropriate improvements in quality. There should be a clinical leader, a technical expert, a day-to-day leader and a project sponsor (Institute for Health Improvement, n.d.). There can be more individuals than that, but an effective team makes sure that those areas are covered. The stakeholders in my organization would include the quality manager, the director of nursing, the assistant director of nursing, nursing supervisors, floor nurses, CNAs, wound nurse, doctors, nurse educator infection control, and data analysts. Depending on the reason or purpose for the team the leadership roles could fall on any one that makes up the team. The project sponsor would be the doctors or the director or assistant director of nursing. The clinical leader would be the nursing supervisor. The technical expert could be infection control or a wound nurse depending on the reason for the team. The day-to-day leadership would be the nurses or other individuals who are in the thick of the day to day exchanges for whatever the quality improvement is.

There are many potential challenges when slaving quality issues through the development of a team. Not inviting the right person to join the team could lead to feelings of exclusion and a lack of desire to help make the change required for quality improvement. There could be personality conflicts within the team which would make the process not effective in trying to solve the issue because individuals could argue of every step of the way. The team may try to tackle something large all at once instead of trying to make the change a little at a time which allows for the best outcomes and for a more likely sustainability of the change (Nash, Joshi, Ransom, & Ransom, 2019). Taking in the opinions and experiences of everyone, regardless of their title, is important because many people bring great insights that others would never have thought of. Team work can be an effective way of creating quality change in an organization.

References

Institute for Healthcare Improvement. (n.d.). Science of Improvement: Forming the team. http://www.ihi.org/resources/Pages/HowtoImprove/ScienceofImprovementFormingtheTeam.aspx

Nash, D. B., Joshi, M. S., Ransom, E. R., & Ransom, S. B. (Ed