Upcoming
Collective Competence?: Rethinking the Discourse of Competence in the Context of Teamwork
Time: Noon - 1 p.m.
Location: Scaife Hall 4th Floor, Lecture Room 3
- Lorelei Lingard, PhD
Dr. Lorelei Lingard is a leading researcher in the study of communication and collaboration on healthcare teams. She is a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) and the inaugural director of the Centre for Education Research & Innovation at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at UWO.
Dr. Lingard obtained her PhD in rhetoric from the English department at Simon Fraser University, specializing in rhetorical theory, genre theory, medical discourse, and qualitative methodology. As a rhetorician, she investigates "language as social action’’: that is, how social groups use language to get things done, and how that language acts on them, their identities, their purposes, their situations, their relationships. Her research program has investigated the nature of communication on interprofessional healthcare teams in a variety of clinical settings, including the operating room, the intensive care unit, the internal medicine ward, the adult rehabilitation unit, and the family health center. She is particularly interested in how communication patterns influence patient safety, and how learning to talk in sanctioned ways shapes the professional identity of novices. In addition to her team communication research, she is currently intrigued by methodological challenges such as accounting for silence in the study of communication and conceptual projects such as critiquing the individualist discourse of competence.
About This Session
The health professional community has embraced the notion of "expert teams" as critical to its clinical and educational mandates. Now, how do we assess "competence" in this domain? Our orientation has been towards individual competence; but what about situations in which individually "competent" health professionals combine to form an "incompetent" team?
Objectives
1. To review the conventional, individualist discourse on competence which underpins much health professional assessment
2. To suggest another discourse, characterizing competence as a shared and distributed construct
3. To discuss what each discourse emphasizes and deflects, and to consider the implications of the concept of distributed, collective competence for health professional education
Key Messages
The individualist discourse of competence has supported certain kinds of education and assessment, and constrained others. Given the emphasis on expert teamwork in current clinical and educational frameworks, we need to extend this conventional discourse to allow for the distributed and collective nature of competence in team situations. This new discourse will challenge our traditional approaches to "measuring" and "maintaining" competence.
Continuing Medical Education
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine designates this educational activity for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
Other health care professionals are awarded 0.10 continuing education units (CEUs) which are equal to 1.0 contact hours.
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