HS460C is the capstone course for my undergraduate degree. This is the end of the course. This course is centrally focused on teamwork and leadership as it pertains to working the health care field. It is essentially a course that connects the various aspects of health because we as health professionals are responsible for providing quality care for sick patients. Through this course I realized that our personal health, family health and community health call all have an affect on the quality of care being delivered to patients. If we as healthcare providers are not taking care of our own personal health, we are not performing at our best and can cause the health care organizations that we work for to suffer. This course helped me to realize the importance of relationships within a healthcare team. For example, if the healthcare organizations we work for are not functioning effectively, are not providing adequate resources or not adapting and changing to the presented needs of the community, then we all suffer – patient satisfaction is interconnected to the various aspects that promote organizational health – financial health, effective teamwork, and great leaders. One assignment that stood out and drove home the importance of positive interconnectedness was application activity #4. This assignment was used to help recognize the various aspects within a healthcare organization that may or may not be good. From this assignment, I learned more about the dynamic operations and relationships of my own work place. This included what people talked about (good or bad), finding and understanding a common purpose, and characteristics of a community practice such as engagement in information sharing activities. These things fit into the learning outcome for this course. This class was especially good at stressing the importance of a community mindset!
Below, please take a moment to read a part from application activity #4
There are three distinguishable features of a community practice that can be seen in our team and workplace. These three include shared interest, engagement in information-sharing activities and a development of shared resources. First, we all have a shared interest in providing care to all patients that come to us. This shared interest is applied by constant assessment of patient care quality through team member feedback and patient surveys. Engagement in information-sharing activities for our team includes once a week pulling suggestions out of a suggestion box to implement. Another information sharing activity is open dialogue in our staff meeting. The information exchanged here is concerns, opinions, thoughts, and feedback. This information is often transferred to a piece of paper that is typed up by the manager reminding everyone of the key take away points following the meeting. Lastly, for the development of shared resources, quarterly in-house training sessions for all employees are conducted so that quality patient care is never compromised. Often times in this, our manager will delegate specific people (who are proficient at certain tasks) to train the other members of the team on those tasks. It gives opportunities for leadership and learning of all participants. I believe that our healthcare team overall demonstrates the community of practice in that we have implemented means of applying these characteristics and produce positive patient care and foster most healthy interpersonal relationships. However, sometimes conflict can take a very long time to be sorted out and so in that we need improvement.
Michael's HS-460 e-Portfolio 