To Prepare:
Review the Learning Resources for this week, and consider the potential impact and role of teams in quality improvement.
Reflect on potential strategies for building effective teams in promoting quality improvement initiatives for nursing practice and/or healthcare organizations.
Consider the type of stakeholders that might comprise these teams and potential challenges for “earning a seat at the table†of such a quality improvement team.
By Day 3 of Week 7
Post a brief explanation of a strategy you might recommend for building effective teams to support a quality improvement initiative in your healthcare organization or nursing practice. Be specific. Briefly describe the stakeholders you would recommend to make up this quality improvement team, and explain why. Be sure to define the roles of the members making up the quality improvement team. Then, explain any potential challenges or considerations you should keep in mind that may affect who might “earn a seat at the table†to comprise this team. Be specific and provide examples.
Strategies for Building Effective Teams
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliations
Strategies for Building Effective Teams
Teams play an essential role in quality improvement initiatives. They ensure that the necessary activities or tasks are performed to promote success. An example of a quality improvement initiative that would require team involvement is the installation of bed alarms in the elderly ward to prevent patient falls. Rates of patient falls have been on the rise in the elderly ward recently. The organization is planning to implement a quality improvement initiative that will see every bed in the ward installed with a bed alarm to alert nurses when patients are trying to get out of bed. Although they are noisy and intrusive, bed alarms are key interventions for improving patient safety in healthcare settings among patients who are prone to falls (Mileski et al., 2019). The purpose of this discussion is to explore strategies for building effective teams in the proposed quality improvement initiative.
Team-Building Strategy
A team-building strategy that is recommended for the quality improvement initiative is helping team members to understand their roles. In a united team, members normally work together performing complementary roles with the aim of achieving a common goal. Team members accomplish tasks effectively when roles are clearly identified. Such a team remains united because potential role conflicts are avoided (SHRM, 2021). The team leader is charged with the responsibility of ensuring that every team member understands his or her roles before the start of a project. In the proposed quality improvement initiative, the team leader should create time to explain to team members their roles and how accomplishing those roles will promote the success of the project.
Stakeholders and their Roles
A number of stakeholders would be involved in the planning and implementation of the quality improvement initiative. The stakeholders include the nurse manager, the nurses deployed in the elderly ward, the hospital technician, and the finance officer. The role of the nurse manager is to ensure that the quality improvement initiative is designed in a manner that meets healthcare standards and regulations (Kodama & Fukahori, 2017). Nurses deployed in the elderly ward are the primary stakeholders that will benefit from the planned training. Therefore, their role in the initiative is to ensure that their interests, as well as those of patients, are taken into consideration. While the role of the hospital technician is to ensure that the nurses understand how to operate the bed alarms, the finance officer will be charged with the responsibility of helping the facility to stay within budget even as it plans and executes the quality improvement initiative (Mileski et al., 2019). For the initiative to be successful, these stakeholders will be required to remain united and keep consulting one another from the start to the end.
Potential Challenges or Considerations
A potential challenge that might be experienced when selecting the right stakeholders to “earn a seat at the table” is choosing professionals who are experienced in their respective fields. It is important to consider the level of experience possessed by the other stakeholders apart from the nursing staff. Doing so will determine the nature of the contribution that they will bring to the team (Balane et al., 2020). The best way to mitigate the challenge is to involve a nurse manager, a technician, and a finance officer who has worked for the organization for at least two years.
Conclusion
The use of appropriate team-building strategies promotes team cohesion and enhances the success of quality improvement initiatives. The team-building strategy that has been chosen for the proposed quality improvement initiative is educating team members on their roles. Team members who clearly understand their roles perform tasks effectively and work hard to achieve a common goal.
References
Balane, M. A., Palafox, B., Palileo-Villanueva, L. M., McKee, M., & Balabanova, D. (2020). Enhancing the use of stakeholder analysis for policy implementation research: towards a novel framing and operationalised measures. BMJ Global Health, 5, e002661.
Kodama, Y., & Fukahori, H. (2017). Nurse managers’ attributes to promote change in their wards: a qualitative study. Nursing Open, 4(4), 209–217. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.87
Mileski, M., Brooks, M., Topinka, J. B., Hamilton, G., Land, C., Mitchell, T., Mosley, B., & McClay, R. (2019). Alarming and/or alerting device effectiveness in reducing falls in Long-Term Care (LTC) facilities? A Systematic Review. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 7(1), 51. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare7010051.
SHRM. (2021). Developing and sustaining high-performance work teams. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/developingandsustaininghigh-performanceworkteams.aspx