A Balanced Opinion on Teamwork

"In pairs....." the Rehab Consultant begins her sentence, and there is an audible sigh. Oh, how I hate teamwork. How we all hate teamwork. She can stick her team building up her highly trained arse, and her bonding exercises can get stuffed. We sit around in groups of our own mates, mumbling vague suggestions to each other, until our attention is called back to the flip chart and the oh-so-obvious answers are written up. It is a perfectly good waste of energy at 9am in the morning. Why can't she just write the bloody answers to start with, because we all know them? I'm learning nothing new by "bonding" with Mike, who I know pretty damn well anyway. Surprise surprise, a stroke can make you hemiplegic (paralysed on one side) and can affect your speech. In then end, we did learn something new about rehab, namely that the wheelchairs they have are perfect for doing wheelies down corridors. Oh, and that the snooker table in the common room of the Rehab building slopes slightly to the east.
In the first two years, we had the joy of spending two weeks per semester doing the grandly titled Interprofessional Learning (IPL) course. We were split into groups of 12, each group included not only medical students but nursing students and trainee physios, podiatrists, social workers, and so on. We were then assigned a totally pointless task that took bloody ages, and was meant to demonstrate to us that we could all work together as a "multidisciplinary team". I will never forget the activity in which we were asked to make paper models of planes and swans and to then get them critiqued by our mates to teach us about constructive criticism. I have a constructive criticism for you, IPL- bugger off. Once we were asked to do an audit of a government funded child health initiative, and when we suggested some changes we were wholly ignored. Unfortunately, the sheer pointlessness of the task only banded us together into a battalion of severely pissed off students. The course co-ordinators forgot that we can't teach each other about our respective professions, because we all know jolly fuck all about them. I couldn't explain medicine to a nurse, and she couldn't explain nursing to me. They should have just given us two weeks off to "bond" together in Jesters.
So here's a plea to any Medicine course leaders out there- if you're thinking of putting in some new liberal, tree-hugging, empathetic, team-building, hand-shaking initiative to waste more of my precious time, then just, please don't. What use are team building skills if I haven't had enough time to learn about asthma?