Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
An institution boasts that they prioritize collaborative practice, and have a wide range of professions involved in patient care. However, in reality, each profession trains, communicates, and solves problems separately.
What are silos?
A disagreement about the best diagnosis, treatment plan, or clinical priority.
What is task conflict?
Educators are not neutral observers of power dynamics; they shape them through behaviours they model. An educator who debriefs a simulation asking “Whose perspectives were missing, interrupted, or delayed?” is modelling this practice.
What is power awareness?
Team functioning is dependent on team member relationships and social interactions. This ability to understand, use, and manage emotions is important for strong and effective leadership.
What is emotional intelligence?
The process of developing and maintaining effective interprofessional working relationships between learners, practitioners, communities, and patients (and their families) to enable optimal health outcomes.
What is Interprofessional Collaboration?
According to the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), a provider who says "Let's sit down together and create a plan that addresses both of our concerns" is exhibiting this conflict handling mode.
What is collaborating?
Prior to beginning a simulation, an educator clearly defines expectations, normalizes mistakes, and ensures learners understand both their own role and the roles of others. These strategies are built in to the learning activity design to foster this key feature of collaborative practice.
What is psychological safety?
The ability of leaders to collectively build relationships and engage others within and across the boundaries of teams, cultivate teamwork by drawing on members' strengths, and enable the team to perform with greater flexibility are characteristics of this form of leadership.
What is collaborative leadership?
A team communicates respectfully and gets along well, but tasks are duplicated and important responsibilities are missed because team members have failed to address this domain.
What is role clarification?
An educator must be willing to lead with curiosity rather than assumption and have a willingness to repair communication harm in order to model this lifelong process.
What is cultural humility?
Individuals may experience power and marginalization through multiple, overlapping social identities, including race, gender, age, accent, culture, ability, sexuality, and professional role, shaping how safe they feel speaking up. This approach to power awareness is highlighted through this framework.
What is intersectionality?
You are developing a course in interprofessional use of a new communication tool at your institution. Unsure of how to create the instructional strategy, you decide to ask yourself what the learners need to understand and be able to accomplish. You are using this educational design approach.
What is Backwards Learning?
The CIHC framework outlines six competency domains for effective collaborative practice. This competency addresses differences and disagreements constructively to maintain team cohesion and relationships.
What is Team Differences/Disagreements Processing?
Educators can have their learners temporarily assume the communication patterns of another profession to disrupt assumptions and support interprofessional communication development using this teaching strategy.
What is Role Reversal?
Misunderstandings about roles are among the most common preventable barriers to interprofessional collaboration in clinical environments. This theory helps teams develop a unified understanding of the situation, each member's roles, and the goal for care.
What is the Shared Mental Models Theory?
You are designing a learning experience in which after learning the stages of labour and delivery, learners are asked to predict how the care plan would change if an unexpected shoulder dystocia occurred. This is an example of which phase of the ICE Model.
What is Extensions?
As educators, your learners will be practicing in increasingly collaborative environments due to significant increases in the complexity of this aspect of healthcare.
What is patient conditions/comorbidities?
In your role as educator, you are creating a learning experience to help learners normalize and navigate conflict. You define goals and establish a conflict trigger. You choose to incorporate these contextual elements, such as workload, system barriers, hierarchy, and cultural misunderstandings, to teach learners that conflict rarely occurs in isolation.
What are stressors and constraints?
This teaching orientation provides educators with a way to design learning that does not simply describe inequity but actively helps learners recognize and interrupt it in practice. Rather than focusing on individual intent, this approach emphasizes how systems, norms, and professional cultures shape interactions.
What is Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy?
As an educator, you are assessing a team's ability to collaborate effectively during a resuscitation. You choose to observe the team over several simulations, alongside two other assessors, and utilize several tools to assess various aspects of collaboration. This is an example of this assessment principle.
What is triangulation?