Leadership and interprofessional team management

Overview & Definition

A two-year-old arrests on the ward at three in the morning. Within a minute the bed space is crowded: a registrar, two nurses, a resident, a pharmacist, a parent watching from the door. Whether that child survives in good neurological shape depends less on any single clinician's knowledge than on how well the team works together. This leaf teaches you how to lead, join and judge that team. Deep human-factors theory lives on the patient-safety page; the improvement methods on the quality-improvement page; the conflict-handling on the difficult-encounters page. [2] [4]

Clinical leadership is setting a direction, aligning people around it, and creating the conditions in which they can do good work. The systematic reviews distinguish leadership sharply from management (planning, organising, budgeting and control) and from mere clinical expertise. A brilliant clinician can be a poor leader, and a strong leader does not have to be the most senior person in the room. [14] [15]

An interprofessional team is a group from different professions who learn with, from and about each other and share decisions around a common goal — a paediatrician, a nurse, a pharmacist, an allied-health therapist, a social worker and the family working as one. That is stronger than a multidisciplinary team, where experts work in parallel, and more integrated than an interdisciplinary team, where information is shared but decisions are not always joint. The child with medical complexity is the clearest case for genuine interprofessional care. [5] [17]

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