Understanding & Application of Multi-disciplinary Skills Learnt from this Course

Introduction

Success in the health sector calls for collaboration with different professionals. To realize this, the training of community health workers should, therefore, take a multi-disciplinary approach so that they can learn and appreciate working together with other professions during their practice. Henceforth, this paper explains how my understanding of the multi-disciplinary nature of this course has changed, how it relates to the topic I discussed under the community health issue I had picked on week 1 and finally expands on the insights.

Thanks to the multi-disciplinary nature of the course, I have learned the importance of teamwork because it enables the development of a working partnership that is productive, which is beneficial not only to us as practitioners but also to the community we serve at large. Having read the various readings suggested during the course, I was able to cite so much evidence on how collaboration and teamwork benefits and provides positive results in community health (Clark et al., 2009). This is because, the coming together of people with different constructive ideas from different agencies, organizations or sectors brings a lot of strength which promotes better decision making in health care service to members of the public (Jansen, 2008). Multi-disciplinary knowledge enables the coming together of different groups, private and public agencies, which normally see themselves as having no role in community health. Such fallacies are normally clarified together with roles to avoid unnecessary rivalry when these diverse organizations come together (Wills & Naidoo, 2001).

Multi-disciplinary skills in this course widened the spectrum of my knowledge, skills, and experience, which has come from different fields that are not community health-related. In fact, I am now able to apply multi-disciplinary skills in the community health outreach task I had earlier. I believe the involvement of communication experts in an organization is important given that my task was about communication with employees. When employees are properly communicated to by an expert, the information is well comprehended especially if it is health or safety related (Yeager, 2005). This is the reason why in many organizations, whether health-related or not, communication experts are normally hired to take care of matters of communication whether through memos, letters, emails or any other formal or informal means. Another category of experts, which I feel ought to work closely with organizations related to health include disaster management experts. The experts are expected to take care of issues related to preparedness and response if disasters or health emergencies strike. This is very important given that even though their work is different from that of community health workers, they may collaborate a lot in times of emergencies (Yeager, 2005).

It has been proven that most organizations that embrace a multi-disciplinary approach by collaborating with other agencies register greater results than those that work alone. This is because, organizations that collaborate have rich access to sponsorship, training, and partnership networks, which helps them to understand the immediate or most urgent needs of members of the community to eliminate any loopholes in the form of health hazards that may arise (Wills & Naidoo, 2001).

Conclusion

In conclusion, as an upcoming community health worker, I am very proud of my future job because I am optimistic it will be based on a multi-professional foundation. This will promote continuity in healthcare, sharing of information, proper coordination and planning as well as timely and efficient delivery of healthcare services when the need arises.