Collective responsibility and health care teams

Society is developing a heightened awareness of the importance of treating the whole patient and is seeking a treatment mode which satisfies this need. Health care treatment teams (especially inter-disciplinary) are receiving new consideration as possible solutions to this problem. The possibility of expanded team treatment raises important philosophical questions concerning collective and individual responsibility; issues of the moral relationships of teams, patients, and medical institutions. In this research the belief is defended that individual team members, and not teams, must always be held responsible for their activities in both technical and moral senses.

The primary methods for data collection included studying current literature of philosophy, medicine, sociology, and psychology. I also obtained recent medical codes of ethics for assessment. Many of the facts and observations in this study were drawn from personal clinical experiences.

To answer the thesis question required that other issues related to health care teams first be studied. These included defining "health care team," considering whether the concept of team practice has been accepted by the medical community, studying how medical education fosters student attitudes toward team treatment, providing a basic symbology to explore different types of team structures and functions, and reflecting on basic philosophical issues underlying problems of collective responsibility and health teams.

One chapter considered Thomas Kuhn's ideas of paradigms and incommensurability applied to health teams to present reasons for the inability of members to understand the limits of personal responsibility. One chapter examines whether current medical codes of ethics fail to address issues of interdisciplinary cooperation for health teams.

Current findings suggest that whether treatment teams can be cost effective or superior to traditional treatment forms is unknown, that responsibility attribution for teams is relative to each one's functional structure, that current research data is lacking to help medical workers and students understand why answers to questions about team responsibility are so vague, that no member of a treatment team can claim to be an expert decision-maker during moral dilemmas, and that medical bureaucracies foster ways for individuals to avoid personal responsibility in teams.