Keys to teamwork success in long-term care based on lived work experience: communication, coordination, and relational factors

Team research demonstrates challenges in collaborative work, lack of generalizability across healthcare settings, and the importance of reflecting the context of care. Forty-four care workers were asked about what does work in their lived work experience in an urban retirement and assisted living community with skilled nursing care serving up to 700 residents daily. Inductively developed major and minor themes were compared to a theoretical model integrating group effectiveness, healthcare team configurations, and team delivery strategies. In the long-term care context, process elements predominated, and included communication, coordination, and psycho-social traits as features to optimize teamwork, with modulating influences from the social and policy context (state surveys and family complaints).