Professional Roles & Communication: Why is Healthcare provided by aTeam | How Do We Achieve | Nursing Assignment Help

Professional Roles and Communication: Healthcare Assignment

Task Details:

HOW TO GET STARTED

1. WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO?

WHAT THE OUTLINE SAYS...

To successfully complete this assessment task, you are required to answer the following questions:

1. Briefly introduce the concept of inter-professional practice and why it is integral for quality health outcomes 2. Discuss the roles and responsibilities of selected healthcare team members; 3. Discuss the use of inter-professional communication in health care.
2. WHAT TO ANSWER

- Please NOTE operative words: e.g., “Briefly introduce, discuss etc).

- An awareness of the following areas: -

1. Professional roles in light of inter-professional practice. How

significant/insignificant is this to health outcomes

1. Importance of professional communication in inter-professional practice
2. Roles and responsibilities of selected healthcare team members: There

are a lot of team members that make up the healthcare team. In light of this and considering the length of the assignment, it is suggested that you limit this to the disciplines in this unit; maybe plus doctors.

3. HOW TO ANSWER

• Work that is used and not acknowledged is considered plagiarised (COPIED)
• You must acknowledge ideas or words that are not your own
• Choose four references to support your argument

Healthcare delivery depends upon inter professional practices of service providers. Quality healthcare services largely affected by two important factor – communication and collaboration. Communication within providers and with community both are critical for better health outcomes. Finally, collaboration among them helps to achieve set targets (Zwarenstein & Reeves, 2006).

Communication denotes imparting knowledge or information verbally or non-verbally. It is evident from research studies that nonverbal communication is much more effective than verbal. Sometime serious consequences occurs because of miscommunication that has huge impact on healthcare delivery system. Shared vision, sense of responsibility develops through exchange of thoughts, ideas and proper information among healthcare team members. This creates an environment to work for same goals in the same manner. It also enhances team participation, and awareness among each other. Three important proponents of effective healthcare service provider or team are – trust, knowledge sharing and respect. Improved decision making through inter professional practices defines effective team work.

It is essential to strengthen inter professional practices to build up trust among community people to avail the services of healthcare system. Positive and interactive environment is the first step to achieve goals and objective of the system. This leads to transparent communication among health professionals and the related health staff. In another way, community receive quality healthcare services and results into improved health status of the country.

Roles and Responsibilities of Healthcare Team Members

Multidisciplinary team works in healthcare setting for service delivery. It includes the following members – medical doctors or specialists, assistants, nurses, technicians, social mobilizers, community healthcare workers etc.

Medical Doctor

Medical doctor at primary healthcare center, is known as first point of contact for the people. Doctor act as middle man between patient and healthcare system at lower level. A doctor is responsible to provide preventive healthcare services (Kendall, Ehrlich, Young, 2009).

The main roles and responsibilities of a doctor includes – preventive care, general counselling, regular checkup, follow up, record maintenance, general screening test, treatment of minor injuries and referral of cases etc.

Specialist

The different categories of specialist at primary care center includes – pediatricians, obstetrics and endocrinologist. Pediatricians are basically involved to take care of illnesses of infants and children’s. Their main role is related with routine immunization and treatment of viral infections. Specialist like obstetrics takes care of women’s health from pregnancy period to delivery. They are responsible to provide all essential services required at community level.

Assistants and Nurses

The above health staff is licensed and trained to work under medical doctors. They assist specialists for different types of services. Responsibilities of the assistants and nurses is to provide right medicines with proper recommendations. In case of any emergency, they takes care of the patient first and then inform the specialist for further investigation. A physician assistant function is to coordinate the patient and doctor as well to fasten the treatment process.

Community Healthcare Workers

Community healthcare team works closely with people to raise awareness regarding diseases, diagnosis, treatment, hygienic condition etc. Their main job is to facilitate primary health care through coordination with other health staff. They assist people to avail the healthcare services of the primary center. Community workers also help in referral process and coordinate with people for treatment. General health counselling and family support is provided by them to enhance the quality health services. Healthcare workers can be approached any time for the services if needed.

Use of Inter Professional Communication

Application of inter professional communication is to reduce the medical error and improve the healthcare service delivery system. Generally it becomes a barrier in providing services to people that can be avoided be effective communication exists among team members. Right message on right time is an essential requisite of the system which helps to improve the overall health system.

Communication failure is associated with negative healthcare outcomes – unexpected health status, increased burden of disease, low awareness among community people, poor understanding of health goals etc.

One of the major pitfall of failure of communication is related with lack of proper information and interpretation of information. Communication depends upon the education background of team members.

Application of an effective inter professional communication – improved health status, improved health patient safety, and improved health indicators (Douglas et al, 2013). If health staff is capable enough to comprehend the information in a correct way then only people or family members will receive right message. This will also enhance the knowledge level of people regarding disease, diagnosis, treatment, follow up etc.

Inter professional develops understanding among members by setting clear goals to work upon. Also increases their capacity and capability to face future challenges. Knowledge sharing is very important to deliver results as co-health workers come to know about each other’s perspective in a very similar way (Louise et al, 2012).

The challenge is to train our resource pool to combat with any obstacle related with health system. Planning and proper framework for effective interpersonal communication is the demand of healthcare sector to work upon particularly to improve health indicators.