Health Care Teams as Agents for Change in Health and Risk Messaging

Abstract

Effective communication in health care teams is central to the delivery of high-quality, safe, dependable, and efficient patient care. Understanding how health care team communication operates within healthcare systems is important. Viewing health care teams in hospital settings as creators and channels for diffusions of health and risk messages is an important contribution to health communication scholarship. Health care teams are essential elements of healthcare systems. In many instances, they are components of multiteam systems embedded within larger network ecosystems. These teams are not identical, thus, considering how team type (e.g., unidisciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary) shapes distinct communication processes offers a better understanding of how these teams facilitate health and risk message diffusion. TeamSTEPPS is an important framework for essential teamwork behaviors that facilitate team processes in healthcare systems. Significantly, we develop specific communication competencies drawn from observation work that facilitate health care team effectiveness. Ideas developed by Kurt Lewin are utilized to consider how different types of multiteam systems can be effective as channels and facilitators of health and risk messages. We end the chapter with examples from field research. A set of hospital nursing unidisciplinary teams comprise a network of teams that form a heterarchical structure with important messages flowing between teams. An innovative form of hospital interdisciplinary rounds relies on specific communication practices to create and exchange health and risk messages to patients, families, health care team members, and other healthcare stakeholders.