Healthcare Competency

This discussion board post will focus on healthcare teams and healthcare competence. I will start this post with giving my opinion on what a health care team is, and how I define competent care. Then I will share my new opinion on healthcare teams and competent healthcare based on my reflection of watching the TED talk by Lorelei Lingard. Her focus is on healthcare competency.

Prior to watching the TED video, I would define healthcare team as a group of healthcare professionals needed to care for an individual. Based on the individual’s health care need, these healthcare professionals could be: physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, anesthesiologists, nursing assistants, pharmacists, paramedics, and laboratory personnel. My thoughts about

In order to achieve the goal of competent healthcare, all members of the team need to work well together. Time can be a barrier to teamwork in healthcare. Patient ratios to healthcare workers can be overwhelming, resulting in time constraints by all members. Another barrier is effective communication between providers and between the patient and family. Providers can neglect to pass on pertinent information to one another resulting in incompetent care being provided. Patients and families can have poor communication tools, and not provide their provider with accurate information, thus leading to incompetent

Lorelei Lingard was the speaker on the TED video. She made a great point, that while you can have fully competent healthcare individuals, and simultaneously have an incompetent healthcare team. For instance, people often see different specialty doctors for different illnesses. Each of these physicians may be completely competent individually, but if these doctors do not communicate with one another there can treatments by one team member that are not medically safe due to treatments given for health conditions by another doctor. Things can fall through the cracks if there is not a competent healthcare team in place.

Where I work we use a computer called EPIC. Many doctors’ offices and hospitals use this same system. The benefit to this is that doctors have instant access to all medical treatment being given, and medical illnesses the patient has. The downside is that, not all doctors’ offices and hospitals use the same system. This is a problem when trying to treat someone that you do not have access to all their medical information. Lorelei suggests that changing our mindsets of having very competent individual to having a collectively competent healthcare team needs to start at the very beginning of the educational