Introduction/Background: Nursing Resource Teams (NRT) are a staffing strategy utilized by acute care hospitals to fulfill daily staffing vacancies caused by sick calls, vacation, and patient acuity. Effective teamwork is a critical component to providing safe patient care and the literature suggests that transient team membership, such as NRT nurses, are a barrier to teamwork. NRTs are being used more frequently than ever and yet their perspective on teamwork has not been addressed in the literature. The purpose of this study was to identify NRT nurses' perceptions of teamwork.
Methods: Q-methodology was used for this study. Statements about teamwork were derived from the literature and a focus group with NRT nurses. A convenience sample of 34 NRT Registered Nurses and Registered Practical Nurses at a local hospital organization sorted a representative list of 41 statements about teamwork along a scale of -5 (strongly disagree) to +5 (strongly agree) on a Q-sort table. Iterated principal factor analysis and varimax rotation were performed using the qfactor program in Stata.
Results: Three factors emerged with the following themes: (1) feeling underappreciated, (2) being flexible and confident, and (3) being unintegrated. A total of 30 participants loaded across the three factors, with no statistically significant demographic correlations. Distinguishing statements helped to define the characteristics of each factor. Four participants did not load on to any factor and therefore were excluded from further analysis.
Conclusion: These findings represent perceptions from only one group of NRT nurses and no opportunity was given for participants to explain their sorting decisions. More research should be conducted to expand upon these perceptions of teamwork using an in-depth qualitative approach. NRT nurses perceive themselves to be knowledgeable, skilled, and able to provide effective care across a variety of patient units; however, some of the nurses feel underappreciated and unintegrated into the unit teams. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / This study explores nursing resource team (NRT) nurses’ perceptions of teamwork as well as their barriers and facilitators to effective teamwork. Q-methodology was used for this study. A literature review on NRTs and a scoping review on teams and teamwork were conducted. The literature and a focus group with NRT nurses were used to identify a representative list of statements about teamwork (n=41). Thirty-four NRT nurses sorted these statements into a table, and using a by-person exploratory factor analysis, three groups of NRT nurses emerged with the following themes: (1) feeling underappreciated; (2) being flexible and confident; and (3) feeling unintegrated. Future research should focus on exploring in-depth the perceptions of teamwork from NRT nurses and comparing unit-based and NRT nurses perceptions of teamwork.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/23056 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Eggleton, Erin |
| Contributors | Baumann, Andrea, Nursing |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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