Collaborative Team Members Research Articles

North American Nurses' and Doulas' Views of Each Other

ObjectiveTo analyze factors that lead nurses and doulas to have positive views of each other. DesignA multivariate analysis of a cross-sectional survey, the Maternity Support Survey. SettingOnline survey with labor and delivery nurses, doulas, and childbirth educators in the United States and Canada. ParticipantsA convenience sample of 704 labor and delivery nurses and 1,470 doulas. MethodsMultiple regression analysis was used to examine five sets of hypotheses about nurses' and doulas' attitudes toward each other. Scales of nurses' attitudes toward doulas and doulas' attitudes toward nurses included beliefs that nurses/doulas enhance communication, are collaborative team members, enhance a woman's birth experience, interfere with the ability to provide care, or interfere with relationships with the women for whom they care. ResultsFor nurses, exposure to doulas in their primary hospitals was associated with more positive views, whereas working more hours, feeling overworked, and a preference for clinical tasks over labor support were associated with more negative views of doulas. For doulas, working primarily in one hospital and certification were associated with more positive views of nurses. Nurses with more positive attitudes toward common obstetric practices had more negative attitudes toward doulas, whereas doulas with more positive attitudes toward common obstetric practices had more positive attitudes toward nurses. ConclusionOur findings show factors that influence mutual understanding and appreciation of nurses and doulas for each other. These factors can be influenced by educational efforts to improve interprofessional collaboration between these maternity care support roles.

Structural Engineering Participation in Integrated Design

AbstractIn the integrated design environments of architecture-led projects, structural engineers need to be collaborative team members, and the team needs to be inclusive to structural engineers. However, structural engineers’ participation in integration design has not been fully studied or understood. To add to this knowledge, the experience of 46 practicing engineers was collected and analyzed to conclude that an integrated design environment allows for better engagement by the structural engineer, is more rewarding to the individual, leads to better structural design, and benefits the profession of structural engineering. There are challenges for structural engineers in the relationship with their architectural client, which include architects’ lack of respect for their structural engineering colleagues as well as negative connotations of the field. Positive design environments are described as open with mutual trust so that ideas can be exchanged freely at all points in a project. Although further re...

Evoking a reciprocity of caring: Integration of humanities-based content into an interprofessional education immersion course for advanced practice nursing and health professions students

Along with calls to train nurse practitioners to be full partners in healthcare and lead interprofessional collaborative practice teams, there have been calls to enhance health professions education to develop transformative learning experiences, teach the ability to critically observe patients and capture their narrative experience of health, and assist students to become more empathic and communicate more clearly. In a Health Resources and Services Administration-funded advanced nursing education project that included advanced practice nursing, dentistry, pharmacy and social work students, several humanities-based learning strategies were infused into an interprofessional curriculum that was paired with interprofessional collaborative practice at an urban, primary care clinic serving underserved patients with multiple chronic conditions. The current study explored students’ reactions to the humanities-based interprofessional education curriculum using qualitative data from focus groups and reflective journal entries regarding student perceptions of their interprofessional collaborative practice experience in the clinical setting focused on the interprofessional education core competencies. Four major themes were identified that relate to the humanities-based curriculum. Student participants gained confidence in their abilities as health providers, improved their methods of communication and focus with patients, learned how to negotiate ethical situations in support of patient-centeredness, and grew as members of interprofessional collaborative practice teams. Thus, the inclusion of the humanities into nursing and interprofessional education and practice can assist with strengthening presence, promoting moral imagination, and evoking a reciprocity of caring that can lead to improved patient care and outcomes.

Team performance in a lean manufacturing operation: it takes the will and a way to succeed

As contemporary manufacturing companies embark upon the lean transformation, they are relying upon a more collaborative, cross-trained workforce that strives to deliver a quality product at the required time. This longitudinal study tracked five multifunctional work teams involved in a pull system implementation effort at an electronics assembly plant. This research examines the relationship between team characteristics including the inclination to collaborate, team flexibility and shared team priorities; and team performance measures that include performance to schedule, product quality and labour efficiency. Team member collaboration was positively associated with schedule performance and labour efficiency. Team flexibility was positively related to product quality. Finally, the concept of team priority consonance is introduced, which showed a positive association with schedule performance.

One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization

This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The project, which brought together AVL's programmers, visualization experts, and artists with NCAR's scientists, required the integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives. In the language of such collaborations, the term renaissance team was coined to capture the collective expertise necessary to produce modern, high-end visualizations of large data sets. In this article, we deploy Simondon's concepts of technical objects and collective individuation to analyze the development of AVL's Katrina simulation. One extended sequence of team member collaboration suggests that technical objects also be treated as “collaborators,” for they have the capacity to transform such collectives through the unique problems they present.

Choice and control: How involved are people with epilepsy and their families in the management of their epilepsy? Results from an Australian survey in the disability sector

This study explored the extent to which people with epilepsy and their families have choice and control over the management of their epilepsy and the support provided in the Australian disability sector. It measured the level of direct involvement in planning and recording of their epilepsy health-care needs and support required through the use of epilepsy management plans. An Australian online survey was completed by 118 adults with epilepsy and 171 family members of children and adults with epilepsy, providing demographic and diagnostic data and details of their epilepsy management plan, whether they were involved in writing the plan and the extent to which it included their views on how they want to be supported. Results indicate that just over half of all respondents had an epilepsy management plan, with 83% revised within the past 12months. Although the majority of respondents were directly involved in writing their plan (87%), only two-thirds (66%) felt that their plan included their views on how they wanted to be supported. Open-ended comments from 111 respondents indicated their desire to be actively involved in this process, as either collaborative team members or ‘in charge’ of the process. In spite of a move towards person-centered approaches and greater choice and control, further emphasis must be placed on actively involving the person with epilepsy and their family in writing and incorporating their views on support within their epilepsy management plans. This research was undertaken by the Epilepsy Foundation to inform the development of epilepsy support resources for the newly introduced Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Case Study: Heartbreak and Lessons Learned

Case Study: Heartbreak and Lessons Learned

Harmonious Healthcare Teams: What Healthcare Professionals Can and Cannot Learn from Chamber Musicians

Background: As healthcare becomes increasingly team based, we need new ways of educating trainees to be collaborative team members. One approach is to look to other professions that have developed highly effective ways of collaborating. Doctors have already turned to musicians for specific lessons; however, as of yet, there has been little empirical study of the ways that musicians interact in ensembles, or analysis of how this might provide insights for healthcare. Our hypothesis is that healthcare teams might learn from understanding collaborative practices of chamber musicians.Methods and Findings: We undertook an exploratory study of professional musicians playing in non-conducted ensembles. We used semi-structured interviews to explore factors the musicians considered important for effective group function. The interviews were transcribed and coded thematically. We identified three prominent themes that have relevance for healthcare teams.Conclusions: The highly individual nature of each musical group’s identity suggests that a focus on generic interprofessional education skills development may be insufficient. Furthermore, musicians’ understanding of the fundamental role of non-melodic parts provides the possibility of more nuanced leadership models. Finally, essential differences between musicians’ interactions in rehearsals and performances highlight the importance of varied forms of group interactions.

A design of knowledge management tool for supporting product development

New Product Development (NPD) is one of the most important activities for companies. The NPD activities get to depend on knowledge more and more. Therefore, Knowledge Management (KM) has become a key issue and a hot topic in the fields of NPD researches. This paper proposes a new design of an effective NPD-support KM tool for facilitating the knowledge sharing and acquisition among collaborative NPD team members. The KM tool mainly contains two channels for knowledge acquisition: knowledge query and knowledge recommendation. The former one is the basic function for all types of KM tools, and also acts as the basis for the latter one. This paper proposes two types of knowledge recommendation ways: one is a vector-based way; the other is a phrase-based way. Key techniques for implementing the KM tool are elaborated. A demo example is also illustrated to show the functions of the proposed KM tool.

The Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania: An Organizational Model for Clinical Research in a School of Medicine

A new model for the conduct of clinical research was established at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) School of Medicine, now the Perelman School of Medicine, through the development of the interdepartmental Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics in 1993 and the basic science Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in 1994. The authors describe the development and evolution of these novel structures.Five key objectives were achieved with these structures' creation: (1) Clinical faculty have the opportunity to be identified as both clinicians and epidemiologists, (2) nonclinical faculty have an academic "home," (3) clinical trainees are now educated in population medicine, which promotes its incorporation into their clinical practice, (4) population medicine and clinical medicine have become fully integrated, and (5) better epidemiologic research is conducted, informed by clinical insights.Today's center is the primary home for epidemiology and biostatistics at Penn, linking epidemiology, biostatistics, clinical medicine, and the health sciences. The center's core faculty manage their own research programs, conduct primary research in epidemiology and biostatistics, serve as members of collaborative research teams, manage cores and service centers that support research projects, and lead graduate training programs in epidemiology and biostatistics. The department provides an academic home and structure for faculty, provides primary research in epidemiology and biostatistics, supports the center's mission, and provides training in biostatistics. This organizational approach has wide applicability across schools of medicine in the United States and abroad and has been a model for many.

An Innovative TRIZ-Based Methodology to Explore Design Conflicts for Collaborative Product Design

Due to the product complexity and time constraint, it is common to conduct a collaborative design process to consider design requirements concurrently from the product lifecycle. However, such multi-disciplinary integration process may lead to potential design conflicts which has to be further resolved as the development continues. In this research, we propose a novel analytic model by combining the concepts of Ideal Final Result (IFR) and Trends analysis in TRIZ theory to systematically find the possible design contradictions from a top-down approach. The IFR is used to represent the integration of the developing product requirements which are requested from the collaborative team members. We then apply Trends analysis to compare the current state of existing product and the IFR state of the developing product. Therefore after comparison we will transform the differences into 39 engineering parameters defined in TRIZ to acquire possible design contradictions among components. The contributions of this methodology not only derive design conflicts systematically, but also help designers jump out of their psychological inertia and perform the design process with IFR to achieve distinct innovation.

Cutting-edge practice model: Experience in a small community hospital

Integrating pharmacists as formal members of collaborative care teams is one mechanism of providing clinical pharmacy services at the point of care. ThedaCare, a network of five community hospitals (including the 144-bed facility where I practice), began implementing collaborative care in 2007 and

Distributed recommender for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing

A novel model of distributed knowledge recommender system is proposed to facilitate knowledge sharing among collaborative team members. Different from traditional recommender systems in the client–server architecture, our model is oriented to the peer-to-peer (P2P) environment without the centralized control. Among the P2P network of collaborative team members, each peer is deployed with one distributed knowledge recommender, which can supply proper knowledge resources to peers who may need them. This paper investigates the key techniques for implementing the distributed knowledge recommender model. Moreover, a series of simulation-based experiments are conducted by using the data from a real-world collaborative team in an enterprise. The experimental results validate the efficiency of the proposed model. This research paves the way for developing platforms that can share and manage large-scale distributed knowledge resources. This study also provides a new framework for simulating and studying individual or organizational behaviors of knowledge sharing in a collaborative team.

Embedded Collaboration Metrics in the MacroCog Synthetic Task Environment

A synthetic task environment, MacroCog, was created to study cognitive and collaborative processes that take place during planning tasks. MacroCog was designed in a flexible way, allowing various types of teams and tasks to be observed. In addition, valuable metrics have been developed to study team member collaboration. The test-bed and the metrics created have the potential to capture aspects of team interactions in an unobtrusive and experimenter-friendly manner.

Developing meaningful learning experiences in palliative care nursing education

To help nurses develop effective clinical decision-making skills, it is essential that palliative care education includes opportunities for undergraduate and practicing nurses to develop cognitive skills in addressing real-life clinical problems. This article describes the learning experiences within an elective nursing course designed to strengthen the clinical decision-making skills of students in the context of palliative care and interprofessional practice. A description of the course context, major learning assignment and evaluation rubic, and reflections on the learning process in terms of clinical decision-making and interprofessional practice provides an example of how meaningful learning opportunities can be used to prepare nurses for the challenges they will face as collaborative team members in their palliative clinical practice.

Information supply: An approach based on demand modelling and information filtering

Collaborative team members usually come from diverse disciplines; their demands for information are also different from each other. This paper is mainly concerned with how to capture designers’ demands for information in a collaborative team. From a workflow perspective, designers’ information demand is modelled considering three aspects: members’, roles’, and tasks’ requirements for information. Based on a static model of information demand and information filtering technologies, a dynamic model is proposed so that the designers’ information demand could be derived automatically. In addition, the appropriate volume of information for designers’ needs could also be determined intelligently. With the information demand model, an information supply system could be developed to realize the following objective: the delivery of an appropriate volume of information within an appropriate domain, delivered to the appropriate user in the collaborative team.

Be-Attitudes for Managing Change in School-Based Practice

Be-Attitudes for Managing Change in School-Based Practice

Project Partnering: A Medium for Private and Public Sector Collaboration

:This article describes the authors' experience with an approach to partnering. It describes lessons learned while facilitating partnering on large-scale construction projects and an assortment of other projects ranging from aerospace industry projects to government agencies to firms of professionals, and discusses how public-private sector collaboration can be achieved through partnering. This article describes how partnering can lead to better utilization of labor, higher levels of team member collaboration, lower project costs, and lower levels of team conflict. The authors pioneer the application of risk management as a fundamental component of the partnering process.

Unified diversity in top‐level teams

PurposeThis study attempts to move beyond the “congruence assumption” surrounding top management team (TMT) demography by exploring the intervening processes that link TMT diversity and organizational performance.Design/methodology/approachUsing Fiol's concept of unified diversity and employing an information processing perspective of strategic decision‐making, this article proposes a model that incorporates both moderating and mediating influences; and then tests the hypotheses using data from specific strategic decisions faced by 85 top‐level decision‐making teams within the health care industry.FindingsEvidence was found to support the expectation that goal consensus moderates the relationship between informational diversity and decision quality within the management teams. In addition, team member collaboration was found to partially mediate this effect. Research limitations/implications – The retrospective nature of the data collection captured the essence of the decision‐making process over time, but future research using longitudinal designs that include different types of industries is needed to confirm the validity of the findings.Practical implicationsThe practical implications of this study point towards a need for managers to set in motion both divergent and convergent thinking during the strategic decision‐making process. The findings indicate that if managers want to reap the benefits of teams with members from different functional and educational backgrounds, they must instigate some aspect of shared framing among team members, such as consensus on broad organizational goals.Originality/valueThis research identified relevant contingency and mediating variables that help to explain the equivocal results of previous studies attempting to link top management team demography to organizational performance.

Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative

Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative