Collaborative Caring

Taking an unusual approach to the topic of medical teamwork, this book gathers fifty engaging first-person narratives provided by people from various health care professions.

Suzanne Gordon is coauthor of Beyond the Checklist: What Else Health Care Can Learn from Aviation Teamwork and Safety and coeditor of First, Do Less Harm, both from Cornell. She is coeditor of the Culture and Politics of Health Care Work Series and was program leader of the Robert Wood Johnson–funded Nurse Manager in Action Program. David L. Feldman, MD, is Senior VP and Chief Medical Officer at Hospitals Insurance Company. Michael Leonard, MD, is Managing Partner at Safe and Reliable Healthcare, Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Duke University, and a faculty member at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Collaborative Caring includes an examination of interprofessional practice, teamwork, and collaborative practice or collaborative caring. By using narratives and reflections that relate to real events in health care, this book discusses the contemporary concept of working together in teams. This publication is very relevant in the context of current health systems and is effective to stimulate reflection on action as individuals and teams work together toward common goals while at times taking a different approach.

John R. Clarke, MD, Professor of Surgery, Drexel University; Clinical Director for Patient Safety and Quality Initiatives, ECRI Institute; Clinical Director, Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority:

Teamwork is the neglected part of medical training and the new frontier for the reliable delivery of quality care. It is not enough to know what to do; providers need to be able to deliver that knowledge reliably—and that takes teamwork. This book emphasizes the essential elements of true teamwork: actions coordinated by a shared goal, a shared mental model of the situation, crossmonitoring, a flat hierarchy, mutual respect, and trust. If your operating room team or patient care team does not have these characteristics, this book is for you.

Audrey Lyndon, PhD, RNC, FAAN, University of California San Francisco:

Collaborative Caring makes a unique contribution in the scope and breadth of teamwork it considers. It is an important book.