Collegiate Work- Journalism

Working as a team in the healthcare field is crucial in the success of caring for patients. There are thousands of different illnesses, diseases, cancers, ailments, and struggles that people face every day throughout the world. Unfortunately, about just as many of these people go without help. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders (DWB), is a international organization that was formed in 1971 in efforts to help those in need all over the world and in particular those in times of crisis.

The Team

In 1968, around the time of a serious famine problem in Southern Nigeria causing thousands of deaths, the French Red Cross sent some volunteer doctors to travel to the victims for rescue attempts. However, technically, the Red Cross is not a medical organization; the doctors were simply medically trained and wanted to help. This struck the interest of many which conjured up the team of MSF. Based on the MSF website, the team consisted of the original founders being nine doctors and four journalists, along with three-hundred other volunteering doctors, nurses, and other staff. All of the people on this team had to be fearless, strong, emotionally sound, mentally stable, flexible, educated, high spirited, resilient, adaptable, humble, and open minded. Not to mention, participants needed to be able to handle the high stress that comes along with the job as there are not many moments of rest or even time for much sleep. They also were not getting paid for their work, so it took a great amount of perseverance to keep them going. These volunteers basically had to be super heroes––but in reality they were only human which put a lot of pressure on them and could cause some conflicts and issues as to be expected.

Unavoidable Conflict

Doctors Without Borders has served over a hundred million patients all over the world. This without hesitation seems to be a successful team as even helping fifty people in need is rewarding. However, the volunteers who end up serving are those who may have come from a cozy home in California with absolutely no clue what they were getting themselves into. This can cause some conflict in many ways. For example, in a story out of New Republic, Dr. Craig Spencer was serving in West Africa to help during the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Unfortunately, he contracted the disease and ended up very ill. This caused conflict because he could no longer work with the patients and had to return home to New York. There was large controversy with this as he was accused of putting people in the U.S. at risk bringing the sickness home with him. As stated, “astoundingly, the night before, he boarded a subway bound for Brooklyn, bowled ten frames with his friends, and returned to his apartment in Harlem that evening by taxi. The following morning, he developed a fever of 100.3 degrees and, shortly thereafter, found himself in the isolation unit at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center” (Markel, H., Young Doctors Can Be Courageous. They Can Also Be Careless, 2014). This caused a lot of uproar and fear all over the country and put a bad taste in the mouths of those who were supporting MSF and even fellow doctors of Dr. Spencer could not believe he did not selfquarantine for a while upon returning just to be sure. It was a big scare. Understandably, this caused some tension of those in charge on the MSF team. A statement was released from Doctors Without Boarders as, “MSF advises all aid workers back from the field to get rest before going back to work, and it goes further with people working in Ebola projects, mandating that they not return to work for three weeks to reduce their exposure to sick people from whom they might catch something that might be confused with Ebola and cause unnecessary alarm.” (Sprecher, A. New Republic. The Media's Overreaction to Ebola Is Sending a Chill Through My Coworkers at Doctors Without Borders. 2014). Naturally, this would go for bowling and hanging out with friends as well. Once it came to fruition that Dr. Spencer was sick, he was immediately hospitalized and quarantined and is doing fine. The team handled this controversy by assuring the public that everything will be okay due to the fact that Ebola is only contagious when the person who has it has a high fever. Dr. Spencer did not report any fever until he was away from his friends and the public. MSF came together as a team, held a press conference, and educated the country on the infectious disease and how it is spread, how to prevent it from spreading, and how to avoid getting it. Their reputation saw a lot more light after that.

Five Dysfunctions

In any team, there are several dysfunctions that happen along the way to being successful and even during success. According to the book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (A Leadership Fable), written by Patrick Lencioni, the five dysfunctions of a team are absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. As for the conflict in the Dr. Spencer case, numbers one and four are the two that stood out to me the most. To start, number one, Absence of Trust, “In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members and their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group” (Lencioni, p. 195). There was a little bit of everything that went on with Dr. Spencer. He could rely on his team to take over as he had to go home. Yes, he did not know he actually got Ebola, was just not feeling well, but regardless of how severe his illness actually was, he could trust his team to carry on without him. On the flip side, however, his team sent him home with the notion that he would stay away from public and work for three weeks. They trusted him to be cautious to not spread the disease among their country. As Lencioni explains, accountability “refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team (p. 212).” Unwillingness to do so can cause some dysfunction throughout the team. In the case of Dr. Spencer, he was unwilling to perform on a level that was agreed upon among the rest of the team regardless of how ill or well he was feeling. By going out after coming home from working around Ebola sick or not, he was accountable by himself and the team to make sure he stayed far away from other people and he did not. Not to mention, as a team player avoiding accountability, he “place(d) an undue burden on the team leader as the sole source of discipline (p. 214).” That was a big cause for stress and concern for the team leader along on that mission.

What to change?

Doctors Without Borders has no choice other than to work as a team. Not only is it important for them to work together while on missions, side by side or individually, or when they leave missions, side by side or individually. There are many different rules, guidelines, precautions, and specific, serious measures put into making something like MSF happen. It is crucial that the teams who are sent together to help in unfortunate situations such as infectious disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and war work together and follow every rule every step of the way. It is not to be taken lightly. With that said, a great exercise that could be practiced among the teams could be the Team Effectiveness Exercise. The Team Effectiveness Exercise can be risky in terms that it could offend teammates, but when you have situations where individuals are tampering with the well-being of thousands of people, it’s better to take the risk than not to. The Team Effectiveness Exercise “requires team members to identify the single most important contribution that each of their peers makes to the team, as well as the one area that they must either improve upon or eliminate for the good of the team (p. 198).” Taking this exercise and twisting it to fit any situation could make it successful. In the situation with Dr. Spencer, they could have used it to identify who would be taking over his patients based on similar qualifications and personality traits, and they could use it as a team by reminding and implementing the guidelines for when returning home. Maybe with this reminder, Dr. Spencer may have thought twice before going out. This is also very similar to another way to overcome dysfunctions called Publication of Goals and Standards. Publication of Goals and Standards “clarif(ies) publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed (p. 214).” This includes working together on site as well as departing from site.

What does DWB teach us?

Doctors Without Borders can teach us so much about teamwork. They started this monumental organization from nothing and barely any funding. They came together as volunteers to save lives since 1971 and plan to continue for as long as they can. They have saved over twenty-three hundred patients during the Ebola outbreak alone. They have done work in Haiti, Syria, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Tajikistan, Guinea, and many other countries so you can only imagine how many lives have been saved in total. They have made huge accomplishments and without teamwork and collaboration none of it would have been possible. Although they have their conflicts, overall I consider them to be a successful team.

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References

Brown, Damian. My Top Ten Tips for working as an MSF Doctor. (2016). Retrieved from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f98xDqmJNvo

Lencioni, P. (2002) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. San Francisco, CA. Jossey-Bass.

Markel, H. New Republic. Young Doctors Can Be Courageous. They Can Also Be Careless.

(2014). Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/119972/nyc-ebola-patient-craigspencer-doctors-do- make-worst-patients

Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders. History and Principles. (2017). Retrieved

from: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/about-us/history-principles

Sprecher, A. New Republic. The Media's Overreaction to Ebola Is Sending a Chill Through My

Coworkers at Doctors Without Borders. (2014). Retrieved from:

https://newrepublic.com/article/120046/dr-craig-spencer-doctors-without-borders-areacting-responsibly

Weintraub, K. National Geographic. Doctors and Nurses Risk Everything to Fight Ebola in West

Africa. (2014). Retrieved from: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/specialfeatures/2014/08/140829- ebola-caregivers-doctors-nurses-west-africa-sierra-leone/