Transforming Communication and Relationships in Interdisciplinary Teams: a mixed methods study

In interdisciplinary surgical teams, in which the involved health professionals are highly interdependent and work under time pressure, it is vital that the interdisciplinary collaboration is well-functioning to secure high-quality treatment of surgical procedures and patient safety. Greater attention should be paid to the capability to engage in teamwork among the interdisciplinary and multispecialty members of surgical teams if they are to adapt to rapidly advancing diagnostic modalities and the increasingly complex surgical treatment of patients. This necessity is shaped by the increasing fragmentation of health professionals that results from a very strong specialization tendency. Today, most surgical teams are established ad hoc, comprised by different team members from day to day. This fluid team structure is poses challenges for the team’s adaptive capacity and the interactive dynamics among team members. This highlights the need to understand the interpersonal interactions that occur between team members in fluid surgical teams more deeply, as well as to understand how shared goals, knowledge of one another, and mutual respect between surgical team members are expressed at the micro level. The theory of relational coordination (RC) captures many of these desired insights. RC is a mutually reinforcing process of communicating and relating across areas of expertise for the purpose of task integration. The application of RC theory and the associated methodology may be a key to understanding teamwork in surgical teams in search of successful collaboration, communication, and relationships. Few studies have explored how RC can be observed and improved at the micro level in this specialized context.