Multidisciplinary Teamwork and Interprofessional Partnerships in Healthcare Setting: The Critical Ingredients

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the components of successful teamworking and partnership working. It outlines the numerous benefits of effective teamwork and its promise for safe, efficient, and quality care for patients. The chapter describes the challenges to effective teamworking in health care, and delineates the stages involved in joint working efforts as they evolve, highlighting the need for specific teamwork enablers at each stage. The chapter then details selected teamwork enablers, namely communication; the requisite expertise and competencies required; leadership and its types that lend themselves to partnership and teamworking; and power issues within multidisciplinary care settings, and their influences on collaboration. The chapter also communicates other critical factors for successful joint working, including personnel factors, personnel barriers, organisational factors, organisational barriers, and power-related factors, highlighting the interplay of many interlacing factors in joint working. Finally, it illustrates important considerations when evaluating joint and teamworking efforts that require attention, whilst emphasizing some challenges frequently encountered when appraising such initiatives, in terms of process, outcome, and impact measures. The chapter concludes by bringing together these factors in a simple model as a useful take home message for practitioners, professionals, and administrators embarking on teamworking and partnership endeavours.