Resource Center

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 22-24, 1994 in Chicago, Illinois.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

Team delivery of care is becoming more common, especially in areas such as the expanding field of geriatrics.
The purpose of this paper is to examine differences in attitudes toward interdisciplinary teams, perceptions of teamwork, and levels of work stress of physicians, nurses, and social workers, who are "core" members of interdisciplinary geriatric teams in Veterans Affairs Medical Centers in the United States. Differences also are described for dietitians, who are frequently members of the "extended" team. Knowing whether there is variation in the experience of teamwork by discipline will be helpful in future professional educational efforts and in identifying foci of interventions to improve the experience of teamwork and patient outcomes related to the quality of teams' efforts.