The Challenges of Teaching Social Skills and Teamwork in Engaging iGen Generation of Nursing Students

Teamwork is firmly on the agenda of a range of people working in health and social care and calls for greater commitment toward integrated care. Increasingly, health care professionals are being asked to coordinate and manage health care delivery services and manage service-users total care, regardless of their traditional role and locational boundaries. Therefore, individual professionals or practitioners are continually faced with the dual challenges of relying on their own knowledge and skills while understanding and entering into the work of other professionals, which unavoidably means developing new team relationships and ways of working. As nurse educators and nursing professionals embrace teamwork as an essential element in delivering patient-centered care, they need to take a proactive stance in fostering social skills, teamwork, and the value of interprofessional collaboration in educating and training new generation of nurses. As modern healthcare is delivered by multidisciplinary healthcare teams who rely on effective communication and teamwork to safeguard effective and safe patient care, nurses in all practice areas have numerous opportunities to use their interpersonal skills to engage in collaboration and teamwork. However, a number of challenges exist in healthcare environment and educational systems. The presentation goals are: 1) to explore educational challenges to the development of effective healthcare teams; 2) to suggest some educational strategies to improve nursing students’ understanding of the principles of teamwork during their course work; 3) to help students understand other healthcare professionals’ roles and perspectives; 4) to assist students to develop specific communication strategies.

This presentation introduces an outline regarding iGen nursing students and suggests that learning styles and expectations of this generation of students who are entering college environment are very different from earlier generations (Oandasan et al., 2006; Philip & Garcia, 2013). iGen nursing students are required to make explicit decisions with team members to collaborate to achieve optimal patient outcomes. Their responsibilities working as a team member include not only activities related to delivery of care but also the commitment to monitor those activities performed by their teammates (Oandasan et al., 2006). It is crucial to utilize the latest technology to deliver active learning strategies to these students. These include audio-visually rich learning, teaching strategies in the academic environment. It is incumbent on today’s academic professors to design multitasking challenges which require collaborative work during experiential learning, an offer instant or prompt feedback. It is important to recognize that the current literature shows that today’s learners frequently do not take responsibility for their own development or failure, thus it is imperative to engage iGen students using multiple teaching modalities.