Teamwork: present tense, future perfect?
As nurses and other healthcare professionals take over responsibilities traditionally belonging to doctors, Annmarie McTigue finds out how doctors are responding to changes in their team.
Present
Teamwork and the multidisciplinary approach are the current buzzwords in healthcare. In every developed country, managers of healthcare organisations strive to squeeze the maximum number of patients through limited "human" resources.
More than ever, doctors in every field are expected not only to work successfully in teams, but also to delegate duties traditionally undertaken by them to other healthcare professionals.
The roles of surgical care practitioner – who specialises in a task traditionally fulfilled by a doctor or surgeon – and nurse practitioners are spreading around the world. In the UK, and shortly in Ireland, nurses, physiotherapists and other allied health professionals can train to become independent prescribers.
Surgical teams may almost follow a production line process, with each team member trained to perform a discrete task. The surgeon may only undertake a specific, complicated procedure before moving on to another patient in another theatre.
The UK’s General Medical Council reflects the changing nature of teamwork – with medical colleagues and patients – in its latest edition of Good Medical Practice (2006).1 It states that good doctors “establish and maintain good relationships with patients and colleagues”, emphasising that colleagues are “those a doctor works with, whether or not they are also doctors.”
But, just how can and does a 21st-century team of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals work effectively and confidently together? And what are the emerging risks and medicolegal implications for doctors leading multidisciplinary teams? What duties do they have? If another healthcare professional is leading the team, where do the doctor’s responsibilities lie? And what happens when something goes wrong?
Across the profession, doctors have seen the way they practise change.