Advances in Medical Education and Practice (Aug 2019)
Preparing for the National Health Service: the importance of teamwork training in the United Kingdom medical school curriculum
Abstract
Abhinaya Chandrashekar, Jenanan MohanImperial College London Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UKCorrespondence: Abhinaya ChandrashekarImperial College London Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London SW7 2DD, UKEmail [email protected]: Doctors are required to work in teams every day at every stage in their careers. In the United Kingdom (UK), with a drive towards an integrated healthcare system, teamwork has become a major focus amongst healthcare professionals and their skill set must reflect this. For doctors, the art of teamwork needs to be developed from the early stages of training, in order to minimise fragmentation of care and its detrimental impact on patients. The World Health Organisation emphasises the importance of doctors adopting a multi-disciplinary team approach, yet amongst medical students, collaborative work is often disregarded. Fundamentally, the system that produces future doctors overlooks the importance of teamwork. Therefore, the undergraduate curriculum must be reshaped to embed teamwork within its principles. Future doctors will thus be equipped with lifelong abilities to collaborate closely amongst peers in order to deliver care holistically. Adapting medical school curricula across the UK will present inevitable challenges and these must be understood, in order to generate strategies that cultivate a culture of teamwork amongst the doctors of the future.Keywords: teamwork, team-based learning, curriculum, undergraduate, medical education
