Teams and collaboration have become an expectation in most healthcare facilities and environments. It is accepted that high performance, patient-focused teams are critical to quality patient care. However, there is often a wide gap between traditional practices and the new behaviors and practices required for teamwork and collaboration. Improving Healthcare Team Performance: The 7 Requirements for Excellence in Patient Care goes beyond theory to provide the knowledge, tools, and techniques required to develop a single team, or to develop an organization-wide team-based culture, from which exceptional patient care emerges.

Most uniquely, it emphasizes that effective teamwork goes far beyond team dynamics, and provides detailed descriptions of additional requirements, such as shared learning and change compatibility, and how to fulfill them.

A practical handbook for healthcare leaders striving to ensure a superior patient experience and high quality of care, Improving Healthcare Team Performance: The 7 Requirements for Excellence in Patient Care not only provides specifics on how to develop high functioning teams, whether multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or departmental, but also offers those dealing with the common healthcare leadership challenges of:

• Low morale,
• Poor communication,
• Interpersonal conflict,
• Lack of knowledge
• Sharing the tools to take immediate action to improve performance.

Providing a proven approach to addressing and preventing everyday issues impacting patient care, Improving Healthcare Team Performance: The 7 Requirements for Excellence in Patient Care contains everything needed to identify areas of greatest need within a team or department, take targeted action to address key gaps, and measure progress toward positive change.

Practical, proven techniques for improving team performance in the healthcare world

• Presents a clear depiction of what constitutes collaboration and a high-performing patient focused team. This includes the skills and practices required to improve team performance and ultimately the quality of patient care, how to develop new attitudes and behaviors within the team, as well as the leadership requirements for success in a patient-focused, team-based culture.
• Provides a set of development tools accessible online to help the reader quickly and easily apply the knowledge gleaned.
• Offers targeted solutions including tips/recommendations, a step-by-step approach for affecting necessary change at every level of the organization, and skills and team development activities.

Designed for leaders working in any healthcare environment, Improving Healthcare Team Performance: The 7 Requirements for Excellence in Patient Care is a practical approach to improving team performance and the quality of patient care.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Dr. Ken Milne
• Introduction

Part I: The 7 elements of a high performance healthcare team

• Chapter 1: When groups become teams
• Chapter 2: Healthy climate: A cornerstone of the staff and patient experience
• Chapter 3: Cohesiveness: Achieving the common goal of exceptional patient care
• Chapter 4: Open communication: The heart of quality patient care
• Chapter 5: Change compatibility: From rigidity to flexibility
• Chapter 6: Team member's contribution: The sum of the parts
• Chapter 7: Shared leadership: The path to empowered team members
• Chapter 8: Shared learning: Propelling the team forward

Part II: Making it happen: Achieving improved team performance

• Chapter 9: The team development process
• Chapter 10: The leadership balancing act
• Chapter 11: Facilitation: The skill that determines the success of the process
• Chapter 12: The leader as coach

Part III: The tools to make it happen

• Chapter 13: Team development exercises
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• About the authors
• Index

Authors:

Leslie Bendaly, Nicole Bendaly