Confusion in staff roles

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32567, 29 March 1971, Page 17

Confusion in staff roles

Members of hospital staffs in New Zealand were often faced with a frustrating confusion of roles when they sought to help their patients, said the psychiatric physician of the North Canterbury Hospital Board (Dr E. D. Anderson) at the national medical social workers’ seminar in Christchurch on Friday.

Dr Anderson was speaking op inter-professional relationships in a hospital setting. Nurses, psychiatrists, ministers, and medical social workers often felt their role was being usurped by the other profession, he said. , “Relationships between professional groups can be very strained.” At times the patient could suffer from such professional rivalries. “The model I would offer you is a wide area of interprofessional overlap a ’helping relationship’ in which each profession has its special skills,” he said. But it was the division of the helping relationship that caused the problem. It was a mistake to define roles too closely because it would tend to be at the expense of the present flexibility. What was needed was a high level of communication between staff members in the form of frequent staff meetings, and the right of each member in the team to say what he thought, have the right to disagree, and to know he would be heard, he said.