February 23, 2015By Lance Baily

Collaborative Caring: Stories & Reflections on Teamwork in Healthcare

A newly released book from our friend Suzanne Gordon and coauthors David Feldman, MD and Michael Leonard, MD. Suzanne is the coauthor of “Beyond the Checklist: What Else Health Care Can Learn from Aviation Teamwork and Safety” (click the link to read my book review), 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.

About Collaborative Caring:

Teamwork is essential to improving the quality of patient care and reducing medical errors and injuries. But how does teamwork really function? And what are the barriers that sometimes prevent smart, well-intentioned people from building and sustaining effective teams? Collaborative Caring takes an unusual approach to the topic of teamwork. Editors Suzanne Gordon, Dr. David L. Feldman, and Dr. Michael Leonard have gathered fifty engaging first-person narratives provided by people from various health care professions.


Sponsored Content:


Each story vividly portrays a different dimension of teamwork, capturing the complexity—and sometimes messiness—of moving from theory to practice when it comes to creating genuine teams in health care. The stories help us understand what it means to be a team leader and an assertive team member. They vividly depict how patients are left out of or included on the team and what it means to bring teamwork training into a particular workplace. Exploring issues like psychological safety, patient advocacy, barriers to teamwork, and the kinds of institutional and organizational efforts that remove such barriers, the health care professionals who speak in this book ultimately have one consistent message: teamwork makes patient care safer and health care careers more satisfying. These stories are an invaluable tool for those moving toward genuine interprofessional and intraprofessional teamwork.

Praise for the New Book:



“Collaborative Caring makes a unique contribution in the scope and breadth of teamwork it considers. It is an important book.”—Audrey Lyndon, PHD, RNC, FAAN, University of California San Francisco.

“Teamwork is the neglected part of medical training and the new frontier for reliable delivery of quality care. It’s not enough to know what to do. Providers need to be able to deliver that care reliably—and that takes teamwork. This book emphasizes the essential elements of real teamwork: actions coordinated by a shared goal, shared mental model of the situation, cross-monitoring, a flat hierarchy, mutual respect, and trust. If your operating room team or patient care team does not have these characteristics, then this book is for you.”— John. R. Clarke, MD, Professor of Surgery, Drexel University; Clinical Director of Patient Safety and Quality Initiatives, ECRI Institute; Clinical Director, Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority.


Sponsored Content:


Get your copy of Collaborative Caring from Amazon today!


Sponsored Content: