What were the STRENGTHS of working in your team?
There is much strength to working in a team. The most important strength is the division of labor allowing for many tasks to be completed simultaneously. Furthermore, input and critique from a group of people with the same goals is invaluable to making a better presentation and for solving problems. Finally, another strength lies in the fact that we can rely on each other for help and novel explanations when concepts are not understood well and like this our learning process is enriched.
What were the WEAKNESSES of working in your team?
Occasionally there are personality clashes when working in our team. Some of the presentations on conflict management were not easy and sometimes organizing our schedules around each other was difficult and this can lead to frustrations. Due to other commitments sometimes team members were not as prepared as the others would have hoped for and this has lead to conflict as some members of the team felt that they were then pulling weight for other people on top of their own assigned tasks.
What were the OPPORTUNITIES that you were able to capitalise in your team?
We were able to capitalize on opportunities based on each other’s individual strengths. Sometimes one person was particularly interested in an area of conflict management or something else related to the assigned task and they were able to shed light on the topic to the rest of us. This provided us with an excellent opportunity to learn and to process the material from a different angle then what we were expecting or had formed in our own minds.
What were the CHALLENGES? How would you do things DIFFERENTLY when next working in a team?
The challenges of working in a team revolved primarily around organizing ourselves around so many different schedules. Meetings to conduct research and to polish presentations were sometimes difficult to organize as each of us had other commitments and responsibilities. When next working on a team I think that it would be better if we assigned out more discrete research tasks to individuals and spent our meeting time more focused on creating the final presentation and making sure everyone understood and possessed the final product.
As a future health professional, working in a team MEANS (to me)..
Team work is very important to the health professions. Interdisciplinary teamwork is necessary in the future of health care for a variety of reasons including the management of older patients with diverse chronic diseases, to promote patient comprehension, to increase specialization to better help patients, to share learning more effectively, and to constantly improve the quality of the health care that we deliver (Nancarrow, et al, 2013). Solutions that team efforts can provide for healthcare include proactive planned care, sharing of clinical care and data between team members, sharing clerical tasks, improve communication between providers and patients, and improvements in overall team functions by collectively thinking about a problem (Sinsky, C.A., et al, 2013)
References
Nancarrow, S.A., et al. (2013). Ten principles of good interdisciplinary team work. Human
Resources for Health, 11(19), e1-e21. doi:10.1186/1478-4491-11-19
Sinsky, C.A., et al. (2013). In Search of Joy in Practice: A Report of 23 High-Functioning
Primary Care Practices. Annals of Family Medicine, 11, 272-278. doi:10.1370/afm.1531.
