Teamwork in Medical Rehabilitation

Good teamwork ensures the close collaboration and coordination between professional groups and across disciplinary boundaries. This is particularly important in healthcare centres and clinics admitting complicated patient cases, but contrary to what many healthcare organisations seem to believe, effective teamwork does not happen automatically. It needs to be successfully trained and practiced. Teamwork in Medical Rehabilitation provides a guide to efficient teamwork in professional healthcare. Showcasing the practice of medical rehabilitation in Sweden, the book describes how to create, develop, nourish and organise a team. Medical rehabilitation in Sweden is a discipline filled by not only doctors and nurses, but also physiotherapists, occupational therapists, psychologists, social workers, speech therapists and dieticians. Using these multi-professional teams as clinical case studies, the book contains many practical examples from different rehabilitation care areas. This book will prove to be invaluable to healthcare professionals and students as effective collaboration is essential to good clinical outcomes. Managers will also find this a worthy read thanks to its understanding of how working conditions affect good teamwork.

Charlotte Lundgren is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University. Lundgren has worked with the development of professional communication and teamwork in a wide variety of clinical settings, including rehabilitation medicine. Carl Molander is presently a senior consultant of rehabilitation medicine, working in a multi-professional team at Rehabakademin in Stockholm, Sweden. Molander has been the head of several Swedish clinics for rehabilitation medicine and has extensive experience in managing team efforts in chronic pain and mental stress disorder rehabilitation.

Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Historical Background Chapter 3. Teamwork in Theory Chapter 4. Teamwork in Practice Chapter 5. Clinical Teamwork Chapter 6. Team Communication Chapter 7. Examples of Team Rehabilitation Settings Chapter 8. Concluding Discussion: advantages and disadvantages of advanced team work