Health Care Teams

While health care struggles with financing and quality care, educators, clinicians, administrators, and policy makers ignore an untapped resource. Well functioning interdisciplinary health care teams differ from current views of teams. An understanding of this hidden resource, as developed by Drinka and Clark, can help America's health care system.

Addressing a key concern in human service and other organizational settings concerned with effective teamwork, this book offers a new paradigm for conceptualizing the subject. Based on qualitative research conducted with teams working with the chronically ill, elderly, and with high-risk psychiatric patients, Anne Opie has developed a method of working with teams that focuses on teamwork as "knowledge work" and is applicable to a variety of disciplines and settings. Most discussions of teamwork have focused on the team players, notably their interpersonal relationships. Drawing on Foucauldian theories of discourse, Thinking Teams / Thinking Clients provides a postmodern analysis of teamwork that stresses working with professional knowledge in an organizational context. It stresses the need for different kinds of disciplinary knowledge in teams, and discusses the role of organizations in achieving more effective teamwork.

The Handbook of Health Communication brings together the current body of scholarly work in health communication. With its expansive scope, it offers an introduction for those new to this area, summarizes work for those already learned in the area, and suggests avenues for future research on the relationships between communicative processes and health/health care delivery. The Handbook begins with a macro perspective on the contribution of theory to health communication. It then illuminates the scope of health communication around the contextual frameworks traditionally used in the discipline of communication. The contents are organized into six parts, which break out as follows: Part I: Introduction addresses some introductory theoretical and meta-theoretical issues related to health communication. Part II: Provider-Patient Interaction Issues discusses such issues as communication skills training, outcomes of provider-patient interaction, disclosure issues, methods for studying provider-patient interaction, and special populations. Part III: Social and Community Health Issues emphasizes such issues as community organizing and health risk management, social support, everyday interpersonal communication and health, and marginalized populations. Part IV: Organizational Issues includes chapters on organizational forms, stress and social support, groups and teams in health care, organizational rhetoric, and working well. Part V: Media Issues offers chapters on health campaigns and communication design strategies, narrowcast health messages, telemedicine, health public relations and information in the media, and health literacy. Part VI: Lessons and Challenges From the Field focuses on lessons learned in the field, including important contributions by those who have worked to combine academic with policy/practitioner perspectives within the field of health communication, and concludes with a focus on ethics in health communication research. With contributions from top scholars in health communication, public health, and related areas, this Handbook establishes a benchmark in current scholarship and research. The chapters included here provide definitive examinations of the various aspects of health communication, and encourage readers to delve further into these areas on their own through an examination of the representative citations. The Handbook of Health Communication is intended for students, researchers, and practitioners with interests in the various aspects of health communication, and it will serve as an essential resource and reference for all concerned with health communication issues.

Interprofessional collaboration in the health & social care services has become a commanding force, spear-headed by the government's modernisation programme to improve partnership. This book confirms the benefits of collaboration through theoretical models illustrated with case studies.

Through observations in three intensive care units, this book draws on the reality of practice to explore how nurses and doctors work in intensive care settings. It examines the power held by the competing knowledge bases and the roles of the different professions.