Personalities, Teamwork, and Collaboration

Personalities, Teamwork, and Collaboration

Herzing University

        From an early age we are instilled with the importance of teamwork, maybe it was a song we heard on Sesame Street or a high school classroom project. Teams working in healthcare settings may consist of physicians, nurses, medical assistants, referral coordinators, laboratory technicians and students among others. Health care teams provide comprehensive care for complex and chronic illnesses, but if they fail to work well together, they may harm the patients. This essay will address the framework of new staff for a healthcare clinic and the personality’s best served for each role. Also explored will be how to know if your team is working together efficiently and ways to redirect if it is not.

        A physician who is well-organized and sees’s their patients on schedule and completes their paperwork in a timely manner will probably require less support staff. We are going to assume Dr. Smith is timely and efficient. To start off our team, we will hire an administrative medical assistant, this person’s personality will need to be dymamic because their job will entail being able to do a little bit of everything. They will perform clerical work, answer phones, process insurance forms and they can also assist the medical personnel with various tasks. The best personality type according to our lecture notes would be the feeder. The extrovert personality, along with the ability to listen and be “tolerant of others mistakes” and “lower workplace anxiety” (Putnam, n.d.) would make a good fit for the administrative medical assistant position.  To counteract our extrovert, the next person to hire will be a clinical coordinator. This person is like the traffic cop of the workplace; they are in charge of personnel concerns, performance reviews, budgeting, hiring, and firing. They also act as the liaison between the doctor and everyone else who works in the clinic. The best personality type for this position would be a conservator. Conservators are traditionalists and like to follow the rules and regulations. “They seek respect and recognition, and they are motivated by titles, status, and position” (Putnam, n.d.).  This personality type is needed for the clinic coordinator so that the clinic runs smoothly and with excellent quality control. To continue in a more regimented character description, we will hire a medical billing and coding specialist. This person will again need to be a traditionalist and follow the rules and regulations of maintaining the quality, accuracy, accessibility and security of both paper files and electronic systems. For this position, a pragmatists might be perfect. The pragmatist personality is task oriented, assertive and controlling which is a desirable trait when working with medical records. It is also helpful that they like to work alone since the medical biller and coder position could potentially be worked from a home office, freeing up office space if needed.

        We have a good start on our administrative/clerical staff so now let’s focus on our leading clinicians.  I think we will need both an RN and a primary care nurse practitioner. NP’s have an advanced degree which enables them to work as a primary care provider; they can diagnose, treat and consult. RN’s, in general, are fantastic team players, they provide patient education, monitor, record, and report changes in conditions and coordinate patient care, among so many other things.  Considering most of my friends are RN’s and NP’s it’s hard to nail down just one personality type, they are a mix of optimism, tenacity, empathy and patience. Their personality type is a blend of rational, intuitive, feeders, doers and controllers but the bottom line is they excel at communication.

        Now that we have a core office staff making sure they work as a team will be the challenge. When hiring each, I believe that a good mix of both men and women is necessary but what pulls them together, despite their various personality traits is that they have common interests. Maybe they are all family oriented, or they like performing various physical activities like sports or 5k runs, making sure you hire staff that can relate to each other is a fundamental component to building a good working team. Per an article on personality traits in Business News Daily, “skills and competencies can be taught; personality and attitude can’t” (Fallon, 2016).