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No one can whistle a symphony.  It takes a whole orchestra to play it.

H.E. Luccock

One can never live alone and achieve great things just by himself no matter how superior he think he is.

To build a superb organization, one shouldn't neglect the fact that effective team work plays an important, if not a crucial role. Organizational success is commonly linked to all sorts of teams. According to Kreitner & Kinicki, there are 4 general types of team work:

1. Advice team: Created to broaden the information base for managerial decisions.

2. Production team: Responsible for performing day-to-day operations.

3. Project team: Created to solve a sentinel event and handling specific issues in a period of   time

4. Action team: Responsible for the running activities within the organization.

In health care, teamwork has been defined as a dynamic process involving two or more healthcare professionals with complementary backgrounds and skills, sharing common health goals and exercising concerted physical and mental effort in assessing, planning, or evaluating patient care.

These concepts are beneficial when talking about teamwork in Primary Health Centres. To serve better service for the patients’ benefits, the healthcare institution must be well governed so that they can house a vast array of multi-professional team who can effectively handle numerous procedures and equipments relating to a health care problem. Therefore, these separate members in a professional team are each assigned individual ‘assignments’ and holistically complements each other for the betterment of the patient’s condition.

Freshman et. al. states:

Effective working teams must be created and maintained. But the members of the teams are typically trained in separate disciplines and educational setting, leaving them unprepared to practice in complex collaborative setting. The work of each individual may be efficient from the perspective of their own tasks, but overall the effort are suboptimal and may not serve the need of the patient.

From this statement, we can conclude that by having many professionals from different backgrounds and ‘mixing’ them to produce an effective ‘work team’ might not be such an easy task. Strategies need to be implemented so that professionals from these different backgrounds are able to work together despite their different educational, cultural and social background. We can start by producing a similar and main goal of the operation and enforce it fully. Just like how many subsystem work together in a system, this concept must also be adapted similarly so that the word ‘teamwork’ lives up to its full potential.

References:

1. Freshman, B., Rubino, L., Chassiakos, Y.R. 2010: Collaboration Across the Disciplines in Health Care. Jones & Bartless Publishers, Boston USA

2. Teamwork: A concept analysis by Ream E (2008)