ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the systems model and proposes how systems theory provides a general frame for understanding health care organizations. It also examines the typology of health care teams, each of which has particular configurations of inputs and structure and requires different communication processes in order to be effective. The chapter then explains how unidisciplinary teams coordinate activities around an accident. The fire department extracts a patient from a car crash; the emergency medical team keeps the patient stable while delivering him to the hospital, where the emergency room doctors take over. These teams are linked together through sequential input-process-output interdependencies. There are six generic types of health care teams based on structural and organizational factors such as boundedness, centralization, diversity, interdependence, and nature of collaboration among disciplines. Culture and tradition are not always adaptive; however preferred team types may not necessarily be the best if standards of practice change in response to scientific, medical, and technological advances.
