V. Perspective and Suggestions for Future Research (Communication, Collaboration, And Teamwork Among Health Care Professionals‪)‬

A significant body of valuable research now exists on health care professionals' communication, collaboration, and teamwork. However, there are several important aspects of collaborative communication that remain under-investigated, and I posit that attention to three particular areas would be fruitful. From my perspective, research in this field remains overly focused on generating quantitative studies that seek to establish correlations between team intervention and various measurable patient, organizational, and fiscal outcomes; too little attention is paid to describing the actual communicative processes of collaboration and teamwork. Moreover, there is undue focus on team meetings as the singular site of teamwork. Finally, there has been a highly problematic lack of scrutiny of the relationships among collaboration, teamwork, and the hierarchical culture of Western medicine. I will discuss each of these areas of opportunity in turn. A. Teams in Action