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Background reading material for Year 1 Semester 1 medical student PPSD session on 13th August 2008 by Professor Omar Hasan Kasule Sr.
TYPES OF GROUPS
A group is several interdependent and interacting persons. A team is a group whose members work together for a long time on specific objectives. A task force is temporary (adhoc) group set up to solve a specific problem.
ETIQUETTE of TEACHING & LEARNING in THE HEALTH CARE TEAM
The hospital health care team consists of senior doctors, junior doctors, allied health professionals, and students. It is multi-disciplinary with complementary and inter-dependent roles. Members have dual functions of teaching and delivering health care. Most teaching is passive learning of attitudes, skills, and facts by observation.
ETIQUETTE of CARE DELIVERY in THE HEALTH CARE TEAM
Each member of the team carries personal responsibility with leaders carrying more responsibility. Leaders must be obeyed except in illegal acts, corruption, or oppression.
PRINCIPLES OF GROUP WORK
Groups must be united, cooperative, open and trusting. Group members must be similar, empathetic, supportive, and sharing. Group norms must be respected. Breaking norms, secretive behavior, concealment of information, and secret talks destroy groups.
Mature groups have group identity, optimized feedback, decision-making procedures, cohesion, flexibility in organization, resource utilization, communication, clear accepted goals, interdependence, participation, and acceptance of minority views.
Groups fail when constituted on the wrong basis, when members cannot communicate, when there is no commonality (interests, attitudes, and goals), and when they have diseases of envy, hypocrisy, rumor mongering, backbiting, lying, pride and arrogance, love of leadership, and negative feelings.
In an effective group, members feel secure and not suppressed, members understand and practice sincere group dynamics, members are competent and are committed to the group and the leadership.
THE HEALTH CARE TEAM: GROUP DYNAMICS
Encouraged are positive behaviors: mutual love, empathy, caring for one another; leniency, generosity, patience, modesty, a cheerful disposition, calling others by their favorite names, recognizing the rights of the older members, and self control in anger. Discouraged are negative attributes (harshness in speech, rumor mongering, excessive praise, mutual jealousy, turning away from other for more than 3 days, and spying on the privacy of others).