Concepts Of Interprofessional And Collaborative

Introduction

Reflection is regarded as an analytical practice where one is required to describe an event, a real or imaginary scene and interaction that adds meaning to life (Husebø et al., 2015). In this work, I was tasked to reflect on the experience and interactions I acquired when working in the interprofessional team. I was also required to focus on formation of teams and the importance of teamwork noted across the contemporary health service. This also attracted me to focus on the key roles played by the team members in attaining the anticipated results while integrating the experience with terms and knowledge availed by Belbin and Gibbs among other people (Potter, 2015; Gilbert, J., 2016). A refocus on the experiences from nursing backgrounds forced me to consider learning processes that would have allowed me to interlink the experiences (Medina et al., 2018). While this looked like a personal effort, teamwork made that task even easier than I expected.

My team constituted a total of 7 people with four of them being adult nurses and the remaining three were children nurse. I represented the adult nurses in preparing an assignment on the roles and responsibilities of working with service user or patient, patient safety, interprofessional team communication and the essence of boosting the healthcare experience. As a group, we further discussed the role and responsibilities to be assigned to each one of us and the expected outcome of the collaborative practice. A study conducted by Ong, Ashford and Bindl (2015) indicated that while doing a reflective analysis, individuals or learners are expected to focus on the goals, relationships, self as well as methods that can have a personal impact on the growth of an individual. Therefore, this assignment gives me an opportunity to share my experiences and feelings towards interprofessional and collaborative practice (Dixon et al., 2016). It also gives me a chance to do a self-analysis while trying to understand my strengths and weaknesses.

A refocus on Gibbs reflective model even makes more sense in this context where my team members are engaged in determining the roles and relationships linked to Health, and Social Care professionals (Gilbert, 2016). The model plays a colourful pole of making my team to get the sense of the situation while trying to understand areas where the team performed well. The model presents a reflective cycle that constitutes description, feelings, evaluation, conclusion, and action (Tanaka et al., 2018). The 6 stage model, therefore, remains determinant as far as the structure of the paragraphs is concerned in relation to the learning set. Perhaps, the contribution of Dr Meredith Belbin will not be excluded with reference to the roles shared among the team members (Meslec and Curşeu, 2015).

Description

The Gibbs reflective cycle presents this stage as a requisite platform that avails the background details (Potter, 2015). I used this stage to inform on the members involved in the learning set, the experience I had, my role across the learning set, the team dynamics, communications skills that were needed in the process and the essence of the learning set in reflecting on the nursing background of the team members (Fiore and Georganta, 2017). Given that this was a process, we agreed to adopt the Tuckman’s model to inform on the process of group development and the accompanying experiences (Raes et al., 2015). Natvig and Stark (2016) indicated that Bruce Tuckman constructed the commonly referenced model that has five important stages including forming, storming, norming, performing and finally, adjourning (Bonebright, 2010). We also agreed on the essence of sharing roles and responsibilities, a process that was heavily boosted by the Belbin team roles (Mathieu et al., 2015). While the theory of Belbin established nine key roles, we still felt that members could play more than a single role due to a limited number (Platt et al., 2017).

This marks the starting point of group formation where our tutor preferred random selection of students from different nursing courses. Like any other member, I wanted to have a partner from the same course I was doing. Better enough, I was selected along other 3 members from the same course and 3 others from the children nursing group. With a total membership of 7, we decided to form the interprofessional team that was quite ambitious in undertaking the learning set. Hillson and Murray-Webster (2017) alluded to the fact that the group is likely to express the desire for acceptance at this stage. Personally, I never took the group as the right one for me but decided to work with the rest of the members (McNaughton, 2015). Together, we focused on the scope at hand that called for health and social care in the community. We looked like strangers in the start but we kept interacting in the first meeting, which was held behind the registrar’s office. The big tree behind the office sheltered for even subsequent meetings.

According to Pinto et al. (2017), Tuckman refers to this stage as being characterized by conflicts and competition as regards organization and personal relations. Members of the group struggle to organize for tasks and try to mould beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and feelings. On our side, the first conflict surfaced when it came to choosing a leader (Sharp, 2018). While some of the verbal members presumed leadership, others watered down such efforts and resolved to have consensus. Two members almost walked out of the meeting but I managed to convince them come back and join us. We opted to hold a mini-election where two candidates, a lady and a gentleman, were allowed to vie. At the end of the election, the male candidate garnered 3 votes out of 5, and the female candidate only managed 2 votes. While the whole process raised a conflict, the female candidate conceded and the male candidate became the leader of the group. The remaining group members were named as member 1, member 2, member 3, member 4, member 5 and member 6. I personal took up the coordination role as member 6, with member 1 and 2 left struggling for being the implementer. Finally, member 1 became the implementer, member 2 the resource investigator, member 3 plant, member 4 monitor and member 5 became the shaper. Our team leader became the teamwork, and the role of a specialist and completer finisher were assigned to member 1 and 4 respectively.

This stage encompasses interpersonal relations where members acknowledge their colleagues. Most of our members shared contributions, ideas, and opinions that aimed at solving the problem at hand or the learning set. The team leader ensured that we all give feedback on various parts members were assigned to. I personally shared a report on the convenient flow of information from one member to another regarding the learning set.

According to Hillson and Murray-Webster (2017), most of the groups rarely hit this stage. However, our group acknowledged true interdependence and personal relations as the core factors towards achieving the main goal. My team was the third one to make the presentation and members collaborated during the session and perfectly responded to questions.

This was the last stage and it involved termination of the taskforce and disengagement of the relationships (Potter, 2015). The team leader gave me a chance to recognize the efforts of each member and appreciate them for the job well-done. It was a moment of joy and remorse because of a number of reasons. First, we rejoiced because we collectively attained the goal of addressing the learning set. However, we felt sad for breaking up after the assignment and we could hardly accept the fact that it was over. However, we planned on retaining the group for other reasons such as a research and a retreat that was to be arranged thereafter (Mann and Walsh, 2017). We planned on having meetings each month for the purposes of sharing experiences and challenges regarding academic and social life.

Feelings

While forming the interprofessional teams appeared like a dream that will never come true, I felt remorseful about the group work. Perhaps, I thought I could get group members all from my course. I sometimes thought of leaving the group especially when I noted signs of conflicts and dissatisfaction among some of the group members. I also thought the group will never meet the goals of the learning set (Reeves et al., 2018). However, after interacting with the rest of the 6 members, I felt like they were more understanding than I ever thought before. Our leader had all skills of leadership and he always came in action whenever there was a conflict. I found a family from the group and kept close to each member like they were my sisters and brothers. I thought that teamwork is a synergy that boosts hopes of achieving better goals and making the unrealistic to look more real. I reacted positively towards the experience I had in the teamwork (Körner et al., 2016; Harris et al., 2016). I kept my roles aligned with the spirit of the team and kept consulting whenever I felt unsure of an issue. Eventually, I felt more satisfied and challenged after the experience. Perhaps, I thought that people should prejudge others before interacting with them.

Evaluation

The interprofessional team faced a few challenges, which slightly led to a bad experience in the process. First, the integration of diverse backgrounds became an issue, which led to negative attitudes towards each other. Besides, miscommunication or lack of communication impeded understanding and interrelations among the members. However, the problem revolved organization and coordination of the members within the group (Szafran et al., 2018). Perhaps, a leader would play a role of upholding collaborative practices and run processes in the most convenient manner. The conflicts and disorganization within the group would have been sorted out earlier by establishing a good leadership, a plan, and procedures.

This would have contained conflicts and engaged smooth processes that would have led to better results than the ones we got after the learning set. However, it was never too late before we appointed a leader, who assigned roles and responsibilities to members confirmed contributions made from members, appointed the chairperson of very meeting and ensured cohesion among members where necessary (Hewitt et al., 2015). Good leadership ensured that we ran tasks as planned and complied with all procedures. The theory of Belbin and the Tuckman model gave us a guide that reduced chances of engaging in misunderstandings (Senaratne and Gunawardane, 2015). In addition, the adoption of the NMC Code of Conduct enabled team members to understand the essence of ethics in a group work.

Analysis

From what I encountered in the interprofessional team, I realized that the events and interactions were a replica of what I had read in the literature. While a whole analysis of the Tuckman model reflected on the development of a group or team, it appeared to that forming a team had to take the same process and stages (Kiweewa et al., 2018). First, one has to deny oneself before accepting to mingle with the rest of the team members. This means that a person has to fight his or her attitudes before accepting the diversity. While this appeared in literature, I realized that this applies in real life situations. Reading theory made me to learn that people should only establish something when they have a basis. This is the same thing that happened in my case where I had to depend on the theory of Belbin before helping the leader to determine the role for each member (Pandey and Karve, 2017). Furthermore, the bad experience we encountered was largely due to conflicts within the group, which can only be described by Tuckman’s model. While the consequences seemed unstoppable, they would still have been stopped by making use of the leadership, plan, and procedures.

Conclusion

Teamwork is important and should not be ignored by any means. However, I still have the feeling that the membership was a bit high, which needed more efforts in managing it. Therefore, a limit on the number would still reduce issues to do with conflicts and misunderstandings. I stopped from limiting the numbers because I have no powers to determine the number in each group apart from giving a recommendation. Eventually, I learnt that teamwork requires the right channels of communication. It also requires code of ethics in managing how people interact and talk.

Action Plan

While forming a group, I realized that the team took a lot of time before taking action. However, this is never good as the team can end up violating the time frames. Key areas that need to be developed include procedures and plan of how things should be done in the group upon the first convention. The procedures should establish how a leader should be chosen and what his or her roles would be in the due course. Subsequent steps include key areas of the project or task, responsibilities and roles of each member, the schedule, submissions, compilation, documentation, and presentation.

Conclusion

The most salient point in the essay is whether the integration of ethics and procedures can work to better side of the outcome of teamwork. This means that in teamwork, one should not ignore the procedure and respect to other members, which forms a platform of sharing values and beliefs while working together. Possible implications of ignoring the combination of ethics and procedures includes delays in carrying out certain tasks, unending conflicts within the interprofessional team and poor outcomes at the end of the project.

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