8-2 Journal: Leadership and Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Reflect on these questions in regard to your current or past employment:
What is the impact of effective or ineffective leadership on healthcare quality?
What impact does interdisciplinary collaboration have on quality and cost effectiveness in healthcare?
Sample Answer
Healthcare Leadership
Leadership is a process of guiding people in an organization towards carrying out a common goal. Plans are made to enhance commitment to organizational objectives, improve productivity and enhance the culture of teamwork in entities (Ghiasipour et al., 2017). Most of the problems in organizations are due to ineffective leadership. Ineffective leadership contributes to unproductive work behaviors among employees, which contribute to adverse outcomes in an organization. Besides, weak leadership could lead to high costs associated with inefficiencies in resource management and dissatisfaction among staff, contributing to adverse patient outcomes and lower patient satisfaction (Ghiasipour et al., 2017). In addition, poor leadership also contributes to high levels of absenteeism caused by low job motivation, safety issues, increased healthcare costs, which affect healthcare quality negatively.
Interdisciplinary collaboration affects quality and cost-effectiveness in healthcare in various ways. Firstly, it improves patient care and outcomes for critical cases whereby healthcare workers come together to share their valuable insights about the patient and understand the patient’s condition more easily (Morley & Cashell, 2017). Miscommunication in healthcare can lead to misdiagnosis and delayed care, which is costly. Secondly, according to Morley & Cashell (2017), interprofessional collaboration enables faster treatment which helps reduce a lot of waiting for physicians, thus avoiding worsening the patient’s condition. Collaboration evens this out for everyone and helps in ensuring that everyone is taking part in the care team. Thirdly, improved staff relationships, when organizations add power structures, some members are able to speak more than others, and this is not favorable to the patient or for the staff morale. Interprofessional collaboration addresses this issue by ensuring everyone acknowledges that each team player is performing assigned roles on the team (Morley & Cashell, 2017).
References
- Ghiasipour, M., Mosadeghrad, A. M., Arab, M., & Jaafaripooyan, E. (2017). Leadership challenges in health care organizations: The case of Iranian hospitals. Medical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 31, 96.
- Morley, L., & Cashell, A. (2017). Collaboration in health care. Journal of medical imaging and radiation sciences, 48(2), 207-216.
