Team working part 5: Everyone is valuable

Nursing is a team activity; even when I was a community nurse visiting patients on a one-to-one basis in their own home I was very much aware of the resources and support from the community nursing team and the Trust's wider healthcare team. This series is exploring team working from a number of perspectives and this article focuses on the importance of valuing everyone's individual contribution to the team.

Take 2 minutes to reflect on the team that you work with; jot down the names of each person in your team and then, next to their name, list the roles that each of them have. Now think about the people outside of your immediate team: the finance personnel, the electricians, catering staff, all the allied health professionals, security staff … the list is not quite endless, but there are probably twenty or more groups supporting the immediate nursing team. Think of these other teams as a number of concentric circles, with the innermost being your immediate nursing team, the next circle being the allied healthcare staff, then the catering, then building works, gradually working out to the Trust management team. If you view nursing and patient care from this perspective it is easy to see how the various teams all impact on your work as clinical nurses and on direct patient care. Although we are generally aware of the impact that others in the wider healthcare teams have on us, we often are so busy or preoccupied that we forget the impact that we can have on them.