Educating nursing students in team conflict communication

Abstract

Interdisciplinary health care teams are pivotal in creating and organizing the comprehensive care and treatment of patients. Health care teams providing comprehensive services create an integrative approach that focuses on open communication among members. One challenge when communicating in teams is recognizing and understanding the potential for conflict. Awareness of conflict and an understanding of communication behaviors leading to more competent conflict management will create higher quality team performance. Increasing communication competence leads to more cooperative sharing of information and provides the opportunity for practiced decision-making. Understanding the team process can be strengthened by educating future health care workers, especially nursing students. In doing so, nursing students will learn and practice how to manage team conflict. To create an educational curriculum in conflict processes and management, it is necessary to understand conceptions about the conflict process. As a result, curriculum design is based on needs identified from the research. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine individual perceptions that current nursing students have about conflict, strategies individuals use for conflict resolution, and what communication strategies are perceived as being competent for health care team conflict resolution. Based in social learning theory, the final outcome is to understand expectations about team conflict behaviors to create a framework to design educational programs in conflict management for nursing programs.