Nursing professionals use teamwork skills every day. From collaborating with other nurses to developing care plans with doctors, nurses are required to collaborate to ensure optimal healthcare outcomes. If you are a nurse then this post will serve the purpose of being your guidebook to promoting teamwork in a nursing unit.
Students are made to learn the importance of teamwork early on from the time they pursue nursing education. This is because teamwork teaches nurses to reduce medical errors, improve patient care, and establish an efficient workflow. This in turn leads to a successful nursing career.
In this blog, we will list some actionable steps that can be taken to improve your teamwork skills as a nurse.
Increased Communication: An extremely common cause of a medical error is when a nursing professional communicates with a colleague but fails to verify whether that colleague has actually received the message and understood it as well. This is a common blunder that leads to many mistakes.
Even when students are completing their nursing courses in Canada, they are asked to work on their communication skills. Using verbal and written communication helps in collaborating with other nurses and healthcare professionals for developing a team dynamic.
Transparency: Make sure that you establish transparency on your team by being honest with the other nurses and your patients. When you are transparent, teamwork can be promoted effectively.
You can also practice transparency by taking detailed chart notes for each patient and regularly checking in with your nursing team to confirm the status of various priorities.
Role clarification: You can classify and clarify roles for improving team collaboration. When you form a system, you confirm that everyone is accomplishing their assigned tasks without any accidental overlap of responsibilities.
When everybody in the team knows which role they have to complete, it becomes easy to find important information and prioritize tasks accordingly.
Following Up: You can reach out to other healthcare providers and follow up about patient care so that accountability can be improved. Healthcare settings work with high volumes of patients. This is why it is important to take initiative and track progress.
Make sure that you update your colleagues when you complete a task and follow up with them when working together for treating other patients. Following up with colleagues and healthcare providers can help your team stay organized.
Supporting Each Other: The team members within a nursing unit should never feel reluctant to ask for support. This goes specifically for the newly hired nurses who have just graduated from registered nursing programs.
New nurses can often start thinking that if they ask for support, it might look like they are unable to cope with their work. Any failure to offer or ask for support results in undue stress. Hence, nursing staff needs to feel that it is acceptable to ask for support in an overwhelming situation.
Conclusion:
The nursing profession is run by teams that communicate and collaborate effectively while offering healthcare services. Teamwork helps in empowering the nursing professionals to save lives and offer effective healthcare services.
Nursing professionals should implement methods that can be effortlessly embedded into their practice. This will improve team performance, safety, and patient care.
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