These days, primary care is all about teamwork. We are all asking ourselves – how can we make our teams function better? And – a question we should ask, but often don’t: should this task be done by the team? Or is this task actually better understood as sequential interdependence or pooled interdependence?

Our guests this week and last, Ann O’Malley and Patricia Satterstrom, join us for the second of a two week series about teams and can help us start to answer some of those questions. If you missed last week’s show, go back in your feed and listen to the first. Patricia, who goes by Pat, is an Assistant Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and an affiliate of the Management and Organizations Department at the NYU School of Business and she studies how to enable team members to collaborate despite power differences arising from professional and demographic boundaries, and how to facilitate improved collaboration in health care organizations. Ann O’Malley is a physician and a Senior Fellow with Mathematica Policy research. Her work focuses on quality of care and primary care, and part of her research, which we focus on in the show involves qualitative interviews with primary care stakeholders on teamwork. You can find the qualitative study we discussed at length on the show here; some of Pat Satterstrom’s publications here; here is the Bodenheimer and Ghorob paper Ann referenced putting forward pillars for teamwork in primary care; and here is the paper from Dr. Sam Edwards showing that delegating some tasks from PCPs reduced burnout in PCPs but increased burnout in nurses.

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