Medicine used to be a lonelier profession. As the late economist Eli Ginsburg pointed out, there were two additional health-care providers per physician in 1927. By 2004, though, health-care providers numbered 16 for every physician. Medical office practice requires nurses, secretaries, lab technicians, pharmacists and physicians working together with patients and their families. Hospital care, such as heart surgery, shows the need for effective operating teams.
We have only begun to educate health professionals about teamwork and systems of care. In recent years, several UT health campuses have offered opportunities for nursing, allied health and medical students to learn together. Experience in joint problem-solving also takes place when medical errors occur, allowing members of a team to understand their own and others’ roles in patient care. Even physicians, who usually play a critical leadership role, must learn from the teamwork of health-care workers and patients working for a successful outcome.
Different disciplines have different languages. Good teamwork demands mutual respect and partnership, which is challenging to those more comfortable with a rigid hierarchy. Finally, advances in health depend on translating science to the bedside, involving scientists, clinicians and their respective teams.
Medical research increasingly requires teamwork. As technology advances in one area, other specialties frequently benefit, too. For example, the Human Genome Project would have been impossible without breakthroughs in computing and the development and management of large databases. Cardiac surgery, too, required collaboration among surgeons, hematologists, cardiologists and engineers to design implantation devices like valves, pacemakers, internal defibrillators, as well as heart-lung machines. The titanium rib, developed at UT Health Science Center at San Antonio and recently approved by the FDA, allows babies with undeveloped lungs to lead normal lives; this device is also a triumph of materials, engineering, developmental biology, surgery and pediatrics.
“...advances in health depend on translating science to the bedside.”
Throughout the UT System, traditional departmental and institutional boundaries are changing to reflect the need for scientific interactions. These changes include new M.D./Ph.D. programs at UT Austin, UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and UT Medical Branch at Galveston; imaging facilities developed by UT Dallas, UT Arlington and UT Southwestern Medical Center to study brain function and hearing; collaborative programs in computational biology, informatics and molecular biology at UT San Antonio and UT Health Science Center at San Antonio; and joint education and research in geriatrics, combining medicine, nursing, engineering and allied health at UT Tyler and UT Health Center at Tyler.
To generate world-class science by these new teams, we must often have access to expensive state-of-the-art equipment. Campuses that also collaborate with the private sector can accomplish such purchases, as demonstrated by the recent agreement among UT M. D. Anderson, UT Health Science Center at Houston and GE for a $100 million imaging research system.
At the UT System, the presence of multiple health science schools on some of our campuses, the willingness of faculty on academic campuses to interact with faculty on health campuses, and the System’s commitment to building collaborations are all promising signs. We must be careful, at the same time, not to stifle individual creativity. But the future of health care and health science research depends on teamwork. In a university system that takes great pride in its athletic teams, our health care and health science research is furthering that winning tradition.
Best regards,
Dr. Kenneth I. Shine
Executive Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs
The University of Texas System
Dear Friend of The UT System,
