Collaborative Caring

Teamwork is essential to improving the quality of patient care and reducing medical errors and injuries. But how does teamwork really function? And what are the barriers that sometimes prevent smart, well-intentioned people from building and sustaining effective teams? Collaborative Caring takes an unusual approach to the topic of teamwork. Editors Suzanne Gordon, Dr. David L. Feldman, and Dr. Michael Leonard have gathered fifty engaging first-person narratives provided by people from various health care professions.Each story vividly portrays a different dimension of teamwork, capturing the complexity—and sometimes messiness—of moving from theory to practice when it comes to creating genuine teams in health care. The stories help us understand what it means to be a team leader and an assertive team member. They vividly depict how patients are left out of or included on the team and what it means to bring teamwork training into a particular workplace. Exploring issues like psychological safety, patient advocacy, barriers to teamwork, and the kinds of institutional and organizational efforts that remove such barriers, the health care professionals who speak in this book ultimately have one consistent message: teamwork makes patient care safer and health care careers more satisfying. These stories are an invaluable tool for those moving toward genuine interprofessional and intraprofessional teamwork.

This book provides guidance for clinicians working with families and carers. It demonstrates how active collaboration between professional and non-professional carers can maximise quality of life for both the sufferer and all other family members.

The Collaborative Partnership Approach to Care: A Delicate Balance, 1e, brings together the insights and discoveries by expert clinicians and teachers who use a collaborative approach to care. The primary focus of this book is on the relationships between professionals and the people they care for -- not just between professionals. Based on the "McGill Model of Nursing", the authors stress the value of working in collaboration with the client, family, or community. Written for nursing students of all levels, it also will be of interest to health care and mental health professionals. Uses a variety of formats to present ideas about collaboration. Describes ideas about collaboration from the perspective of expert clinicians who have been using collaboration as their approach to nursing care. Integrates quotes from interviews with expert clinicians to illustrate ideas about collaboration. Uses examples from clinical practice to help the reader understand how these theoretical ideas are translated into practice. Describes ideas used in teaching students about collaboration. Raises questions that can guide further research in this area.

Collaborative Practice in Palliative Care explores how different professions work collaboratively across professional, institutional, social, and cultural boundaries to enhance palliative care. Analysing palliative care as an interaction between different professionals, clients, and carers, and the social context or community within which the interaction takes place, it is grounded in up-to-date evidence, includes global aspects of palliative care and cultural diversity as themes running throughout the book, and is replete with examples of good and innovative practice. Drawing on experiences from within traditional specialist palliative care settings like hospices and community palliative care services, as well as more generalist contexts of the general hospital and primary care, this practical text highlights the social or public health model of palliative care. Designed to support active learning, it includes features such as case studies, summaries, and pointers to other learning resources. This text is an important reference for all professionals engaged in palliative care, particularly those studying for post-qualification programmes in the area.

Caring for a loved one with an eating disorder is a difficult task; carers often find it hard to cope, and this can contribute to the maintenance of the disorder. The Clinician's Guide to Collaborative Caring in Eating Disorders shows how active collaboration between professional and non-professional carers can maximise the quality of life for both the sufferer and all other family members. The book provides straightforward guidance for clinicians who work with families and carers. It suggests ways of ensuring that interpersonal elements that can maintain eating disorders are minimised and indicates skills and knowledge that can be taught to the carer for both managing their personal reaction to the illness, and for providing a practically and emotionally supportive environment that is conducive to change. The appendices of the book contain a Toolkit for Carers, a series of worksheets designed to help carers recognise their own unique caring styles. This book is worthwhile reading for all health professionals working with people with eating disorders. It is relevant across a variety of settings and client groups including inpatients, out-patients, community and day patients.

The effective delivery of primary care requires the good working of a multi-professional team who provide that care. This accessible and concise text explores the ways in which primary care teams can collaborate well to advance the quality of clinical care and enhance collaborative working across the healthcare system as a whole. Taking a workbook approach, and including examples, narratives, case histories and further reading, Collaborative Practice in Primary and Community Care brings together theory and good practice to offer the reader viable models for achieving excellence. Addressing specific challenges to practising collaboratively throughout, it contains chapters exploring the contemporary context of primary care, collaboration with patients, collaboration between different professional groups, collaboration amongst organisations, and the respective roles of education and technology in promoting collaboration. Written by a multi-professional selection of experienced authors, practitioners and educators, this textbook is designed for a wide audience of healthcare professionals with an interest in primary care.

This practical and evidence-based workbook offers a series of assessment, implementation and evaluation activities for professionals working in critical care contexts. Designed to improve the quality of care delivery, it looks both at collaboration between professionals and between patients and/or family members. Collaborative Practice in Critical Care Settings: identifies the issues relating to the "current state" of collaboration in critical care through a series of assessment activities; provides a series of interventional activities which can address shortfalls of collaboration previously identified; and offers advice on generating evidence for the effects of any interventions implemented. The activities presented in this book are based on extensive empirical research, ensuring this book takes into account the everyday work environment of professionals in critical care units. It is suitable for practitioners and educators, as well as patient safety leads and managers.

Practitioners of all professions recognize the need and importance of collaboration, yet many find it far from easy to achieve. This book provides insights and understandings into the complexities of collaborative relationships so that individuals and groups can take constructive action to detect hindrances and attempt to overcome them. The heightened interest in new ways of working together in health and social care has merited a new edition of this excellent text. Four new contributors have enlarged on the pioneering work of the late Sally Hornby, adding new material on collaborative relationships within organizational hierarchies of health and social care. Key themes such as the fight for resources, the tendency of professionals to behave defensively towards their clients, their departments and their resources, and the use of individual and group coping mechanisms are revisited. The new focus adds reflections on the effects of the professional and organizational contexts to these issues and provides new perspectives on the effectiveness of helping relationships in the year 2000 and beyond.