Dr. Lorelei Lingard
Topic: Collective Competence: Rethinking the Discourse of Competence in the Context of Teamwork
Date: January 20th, 2010
Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm (Lunch will be served)
Locations:
- Diamond Health Care Centre, room 2267
- IRC 305
- MSB 107
- NHSC 9-370
Abstract
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
- To review the conventional, individualist discourse on competence that underpins much health professional assessment
- To suggest another discourse, characterizing competence as a shared and distributed construct
- 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.
Biography
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. Lorelei received her PhD in Rhetoric from Simon Fraser University in 1998. Her research program investigates the nature of communication on inter-professional 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 centre. 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. Lorelei’s research program is funded by CIHR, SSHRC, Health Canada, MOHLTC, the RCPSC and other agencies. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research, including a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator award (2003-2008).
Accreditation:
As an organization accredited to sponsor continuing medical education for physicians by the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools (CACMS), the UBC Division of Continuing Professional Development designates this educational program as meeting the accreditation criteria of the College of Family Physicians of Canada for up to 1.5 Mainpro-M1 credits (per session). This program has been reviewed and approved by UBC Division of Continuing Professional Development. Each physician should claim only those credits he/she actually spent in the activity.
Accreditation Statement:
The CHES Research Rounds is a self-approved group learning activity (Section 1) as defined by the Maintenance of Certification program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
