6 - Teamwork

Summary

The medical and nursing professions have a reciprocal dependency. Neither discipline could have a meaningful existence without the other. However, each has a distinctive culture, and one of the differences between them concerns their attitude to team working. Nurse training and culture tend to generate professionals who are most comfortable as members of teams. Consequently, nurses can find professional autonomy difficult. Medical training and culture tend to generate professionals who are most comfortable as individualistic decision makers. Doctors can find teamwork difficult to understand, because they tend to think that they should be unambiguously in charge. Psychiatrists are no exception, and they can struggle to be good team players.

Successful teamwork depends on qualities of the team and on individual skills. Effective teams are greater than the sum of their parts. Team members are interdependent in their roles, which means that communication between them has to be effective and continuous. Those team members who are in a position of leadership or authority have to manage the tension between non-hierarchical multidisciplinary working and the occasional need to override consensus (for example, when individual expertise indicates that some factor is more significant than other team members appreciate). Perhaps the single most important personal attribute of good team players is that they are comfortable in their professional roles, which is to say both self-confident and accepting of their limitations. Psychiatrists who lack these qualities either prevaricate and lose credibility or become authoritarian and defensive, neither of which is compatible with effective teamwork.