Interdisciplinary Team Report

Over the last ten weeks of class, I have learned how to work in a interdisciplinary team. It was difficult at first to work with a group of seven people that I did not know and everyone from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. There was a lot of conflict and resentment going on because everyone had different views regarding a very sensitive topic and sometimes I felt that my opinion was neglected or not really taken seriously. However, from this experience I also learned how to work effectively as a team in the future because I understand that in order to have a successful team everyone in the team needs to respect each other and allow others to expressive their own opinion without judgement. Over the entire course I was able to

Meanwhile, I also noticed that some people are very adapted to their own natural roles, for example, one of our team members is a natural leader and she would just jump right into the role and give out orders even though she wasn’t the leader during that class. I think in a working environment we wouldn’t be given the choice to choose which role we would like to act, but it all depends on improvisation and if you only had a few people in your team and you know the most about the patient then you would assume the leadership role. Hence, I benefited a lot from this class because I tried various roles and I won’t be afraid if I’m put in a situation where I need to play out different

However, all of these disciplinary need to work together in order for the patient to get the greatest benefit. This relies on respect, communication and open mindedness. As a nurse I think my role in an interdisciplinary team is the messenger because we are closes to the patient and we know what the patient needs, so we are responsible for advocating for our patient. Under the code of ethnics nurses are responsible to be advocates for our patients, which means we need to stand up for them and we need to intervene when we think patient is suffering greatly or if other professional team members do not show respect to our patients (Raffin and Ecker, 2014). We need to inform physician or pharmacist what the patient would like to be done and all professionals need to demonstrate answerability, which means we need to explain to patients what we are doing because patients have a right to know. On the other hand, nurses also do the assessment and implementation because we assess the patient to see whether the drug is working for them by checking the vital sign and carrying out the physicians’ order to make sure the patient is complying