Free Essay: Using Conflict in A Positive Way

Teamwork in health care is a fundamental mechanism for ensuring the provision of quality care. It enhances patient outcomes by lowering death rates, lessening the adversity of drug reactions, and perfecting dosages for medicines. Achieving this is possible because collaboration ensures that all the caregivers in the health facilities undertake the roles and responsibilities assigned to them with the intent of attaining the overall objective of boosting the health of the patients. Besides, collaboration increases the drive of medical practitioners towards their work. It relieves them of the workload as work is equitably divided according to the specialization of a person and the job experience. In the long run, these healthcare providers offer quality services to the client, which is essential in enhancing the health sector's effectiveness.

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However, working as a team may result in the members having distinct values and interests, which causes incompatibility that creates conflict. When not resolved, conflict may cause inefficiency in service delivery because it affects the mental and physical health of the healthcare providers and their morale, and the impact is detrimental to the patient’s outcomes and safety. Thus, constructive conflict management in the professional setting is crucial in ensuring that the health sector attains value-based results via the alignment of goals with the available resources, especially human resources (Babiker et al., 2014). There are specific methods of using conflicts positively to enhance teamwork.

When conflicts arise, the team leader should have a meeting with the affected members and allow them to air their concerns from their perspective. The occurrence should act as a mechanism of improving communication and highlighting the right communication channels to avoid waste of time and other resources and focus on providing quality care. Besides, the dialogue or negotiation acts as a platform for those involved to highlight their views regarding the best practices to adopt at the workplace. Thus, they develop the possible mechanisms that they would use and discuss them through and focus on the most viable (Thistlethwaite & Jackson, 2014). Allowing the health care providers to air out their opinions is vital in increasing their job satisfaction and performance as they feel their input to the facility is highly valued. Therefore, conflicts can be a source of great ideas on ensuring the effectiveness of service delivery by health care providers.

Moreover, conflict resolution may be an opportunity to define the roles and responsibilities of the parties involved to enhance role clarity. In most cases, the assignment of tasks depends on the professionalism of an individual, such as prescribers, diagnosticians, nurses, and medication experts. Role clarity is vital as it lessens disagreements that may arise due to different working experiences and expertise. Thus, the use of conflicts to clearly define the duties of the conflicting parties is essential to avoid possible overlapping of skills and ensure that all the stakeholders effectively meet the needs of the patients (Rubenfeld & Scheffer, 2015).

Team Thinking Roles

The definer in our practice is the head nurse. The necessity of this role in the team thinking process is that the nurse is usually in charge of determining the team's business and assigning different tasks to the other nurses based on their working experience and expertise (Neumann, 1991). Besides, the nurse has excellent knowledge, as evidenced by his educational qualification and the many years he has been practicing as a nurse. He understands the processes involved in quality healthcare delivery and sets the path that we should follow in executing our duties. More so, his broad scope of knowledge allows us to benchmark with other health institutions to enhance our systems and procedures employed in caring for the patients.

The task monitor is the nurse in charge of supervision. His significance is that he ascertains the execution of the team's plan. Achieving this requires maintaining the aim of the group by surveilling the implementation of both the long term and short-term goals (Neumann, 1991). The nurse offers the necessary reinforcement to other members who may require assistance to get their tasks completed. Also, the task monitor weighs the challenges affecting the team and decides the best person to solve them within the institution, depending on their level of expertise.

The emotional monitor is the nurse in charge of psychiatry. The significance of this role in the team thinking process is that she provides support to the members who may require it emotionally or psychologically. At times, the nurses may feel overwhelmed by the duties assigned to them, while others may experience fatigue and burnouts. The emotional monitor attends to them and encourages them by providing the best mechanisms to lessen the adversity of their feelings (Neumann, 1991). At times, the nurses may lose the morale to perform their duties, which affects the quality of care delivery to the patients. Besides, some may suffer trauma from interacting with patients suffering from various ailments where some even die while receiving treatment. Such experiences may affect the psychological composition and limit their effectiveness at work hence the need for an emotional monitor. At times, the team members may disagree, causing a shakeup that requires the emotional monitor to mediate and aid in resolving the conflicting issue.

References

Babiker, A., El Husseini, M., Al Nemri, A., Al Frayh, A., Al Juryyan, N., Faki, M. O., ... & Al Zamil, F. (2014). Health care professional development: Working as a team to improve patient care. Sudanese journal of paediatrics, 14(2), 9.

Neumann, A. (1991). The thinking team: Toward a cognitive model of administrative teamwork in higher education. The Journal of Higher Education, 62(5), 485-513.

Rubenfeld, M. G., & Scheffer, B.K. (2015). Critical thinking TACTICS for nurses: Achieving the IOM competencies (2nd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

Thistlethwaite, J. E., & Jackson, A. (2014). Conflict in practice-based settings: Nature, resolution and education. International Journal of Practice-Based Learning in Health and Social Care, 2(2), 2-13.