so as you can see we are a team of two here on the stage and we would like to tell you about a new interdisciplinary program at the school of health sciences at the university of iceland my name is violator and i'm a medical student in my fifth year of six and i am i came into this project as a representative of students in health sciences my name is oliventer i'm a professor at the university of iceland and within the school of health sciences and within faculty of nursing i have over the last four years
directing this interdisciplinary educational program at u but i've not been alone since we are going to talk about teams here today uh i've not been alone and you can see on on this slide that we are a good team there together actually it's just one person lacking on this picture is a representative from the faculty of medicine and we have a project manager with us there and at this time we didn't have a student but to begin i would like to share with you a little story a story about a senior citizen here in iceland
who wrote the article in the morning newspaper here last fall and she was describing her experience with the health care system and she said that what patients presently are going through they are running an endless road in the system they're going from one service provider to another they're going from one place to another and she said i i would like to come up with an idea to improve this and and so she said why couldn't we do this more efficiently so you could maybe come on a one visit to two to many service providers and
they could collect the information about your health condition in few visits and you could have the tests maybe done at the same time and then she said they would be able to get a holistic view of my condition also she added well wouldn't it be more efficient this way and sort of save some time and and furthermore in her final words she said then the patient would be the center of attention personally love this story because it showed to me the kinds of problems that real patients in our society are facing regarding healthcare and i
also loved it because it showed a certain core element of our model that we had been developing and you see here where you can see that the patient is a center of attention what really captured me about this educational program for health science students this interdisciplinary program is actually linked to another set of training i had experienced before i started my medical training you see as a young kid i was a music student so i practiced my violin day after day mostly to my siblings terror in the beginning until some years later i was able
to play a decent piece and just like when you're starting to learn an instrument in medicine we start off by learning the basic fundamentals and then we invest a lot of time in practicing our knowledge and techniques so both like in music and medicine you need practice of course you also need a good instructor to teach you how to hold your instruments right or to correct your technique so that when you are as a professional set on the stage of a job you're able to perform your very best for the benefit of your patients so
both in music and in medicine you need practice and it's essential because after all one does not become a really good violin player without practice practice feedback and encouragement to always reach further but one of the things that i realized in my music studies and i believe the same applies to healthcare is that one of the most important yet demanding tasks is to be able to play well or work well with others so when we were developing this program it actually consists of two courses one of them is a theoretical course but the other is
a clinical and this is a course or courses that are offered to our graduate students at the university and within health sciences this theoretical course is actually preparing the students for working in a special health clinic and in in that course they will learn about all sorts of problems that can come up in teamwork and and they need to find out through that work you know how to solve these problems actually when you were in a team and working with others you can find yourself a little insecure you also may not trust the next person
even you may be a little bit unsure about yourself so these elements you need to practice a little bit so it is important for the person to know their strengths but also their weaknesses so as you probably know yourself working in a group or playing in an orchestra with others requires a bit of a different mindset than when you're practicing skills on your own but one of the things that i was quick to realize was that for example playing in a student orchestra was one of the key places for me to assess and improve my
own skills because when you play with others or when you work with others you realize there might be some technique or knowledge that you could revisit or practice more and it makes you more ambitious to become better for the benefit of the group so in the clinic where the students have the possibility of practicing working in teams which will be supervised by healthcare professionals they are going to be there from eight disciplines so there are students from eight disciplines that have this possibility of working together and that is from nursing from midwifery medicine pharmacology dentistry
physiotherapy psychology and nutrition and so when a patient comes to the clinic there is a possibility for him to meet some from this group and and so together what they can do is to assess his problems in a mutual way and and also they can make a healthcare plan with the patient so this will actually you know help them to become better healthcare professionals medicine is of course very different from my music studies who only hurt my siblings here's maybe but in this in a similar way we need to practice our techniques and the learning
process is quite similar it is all based on mastering skills and then using those skills to solve problems of our clients but one of the things that i was quick to realize as my studies progressed and my fellow students realized this as well both in medicine nursing and pharmacology and we've talked about this in groups is that we've never really had the opportunity to train or practice our knowledge and our techniques together as we would work as professionals in the future so to put things into perspective let's imagine that i'm actually studying to become a
professional violin player instead of a doctor and i would i would be practicing my music piece to play with the symphonic orchestra here in harpa but before stepping on stage on concert night i would only have practiced the music piece with the other violins but never with the whole orchestra and we can ask ourselves how would that sound and would it matter how brilliant everyone was individually if we would then realize on stage with the full hall of audience that we were not able to play with the other instrument groups that we weren't able to
play in rhythm isn't it a bit too late to realize that on stage with the full audience like here at tedx now how and most importantly how would that sound to the ears of our audience and wouldn't it sound much better if we would have had the opportunity to practice and train together so why is teamwork important i would personally say i have worked a long time as a healthcare professional in a contraceptive counseling clinic at the university of iceland and there i've had the opportunity to work with many healthcare professionals over the years and
in my work i have consulted psychologists nurses gynecologists and social workers for example and i have started to question it is consultation the best way or should we be working in a different manner i sort of feel like we have often been working sort of parallel sort of side by side not actively together and not actively with the patient so my ambition as a teacher at the university i would like to see this come true for our future students who will be the future service providers healthcare problems become more complex we do need all the
set of eyes that we can have and maybe with the increase of lifestyle related diseases we've actually never been in greater need for teamwork than exactly now to be able to help people change their lifestyles effectively for example regarding obesity studies show that there is a need for broad intervention from many different healthcare providers to be able to have long-term impact that is from maybe different doctors nurses physiotherapists psychologists nutritionists pharmacologists and the list could probably go on two or more set of eyes always see better than one it's as simple as that and it's
therefore that i'm very proud to be a part of a school the university of iceland that has now decided to put that team training as part of our educational program as future healthcare professionals so is teamwork important for our healthcare or is it just the more the merrier i wonder anyway when you when you start to look at uh some studies they have indicated that the teamwork of service providers can contribute or i should rather say can reduce admissions and readmissions to hospital it can make a service cost effective and can also contribute to quality
of care quality of care really has to do with how the patient is feeling so he may be feeling a little better and and he may also be more content with the service as well as his safety may be better secured teamwork can actually prevent adverse events from happening and others events which can at times be very dramatic regarding people's lives additionally teamwork it has been seen through studies that teamwork also is probably contributing to job satisfaction of service providers so what i've been saying to you is that probably you have reached the conclusion that
teamwork can make a difference so the oral crysta of healthcare providers if we use that simile also needs to have the opportunity to practice and learn together to be able to provide the best service that we can and through this program students in health sciences have the opportunity to practice to communicate more clearly to trust and respect each other's knowledge and thus become more able to provide the best service we can to our patients and it is the patient who should always be the center of attention there is no one way of providing interdisciplinary education
we found it important here at the university of iceland to start with more advanced students because they have collected more knowledge and skills in their studies and they are therefore better able to provide the services at the clinic sort of reflecting on these four years of experience i uh i have found it very very interesting and but i know that when we are going to implement this program in the fall we are going to meet many more challenges on our way but i believe that it's good teamwork i think this is going to be a
very empowering experience for everyone thank you you
