Interprofessional collaboration implies the engagement of several healthcare experts with different backgrounds and specializations to work with patients and their families to enhance the quality of their treatment. The current video describes my experience of such collaboration. Apart from that, the video presents suggestions on how to improve the quality of joint work that could be found in the Vila Health: Collaboration for Change activity.
The personal experience suggests interprofessional collaboration is an excellent tool for creating an efficient plan of care for each patient in the hospital. More precisely, a diseased person is cured according to a program designed and maintained by the physician, the nurse, and the pharmacist. Besides, the treatment of patients, who, for instance, suffer from diseases that appeared as a result of an eating disorder, involved the engagement of a nutritionist, a psychologist, and a social worker. Such an attitude to patients allows medics to provide him or her with comprehensive care and do not miss any minor details in their treatment.
The strict division of responsibilities and specialists’ accountability to the chief doctor are those aspects of collaboration that helped to reach an expected outcome. At the same time, it is vital to notice that the team should improve the issue of task prioritizing because nurses cannot escape taking care of patients during meetings of a group. Additionally, it is advised to the team to work on the enhancement of maintaining documentation since rather often the documents and reports replicate one another, and it is difficult to find the necessary information.
Nevertheless, it should be noticed that the application of mixed methods of cure that involve the engagement of various specialists does not mean efficiency by default. O’Connor et al. (2016) argue that weak teamwork between nurses and physicians poses a danger to patients safety and the inefficient allocation of resources. According to O’Connor et al. (2016), the problems could appear as a result of a lack of trust and communication in a team, the absence of clear segregation of duties, and an evident leader. Furthermore, it could be concluded that the more specialists are involved in the treatment, the more challenging the situation is. This is due to the possibility that some therapists could duplicate the work of others and defend their point of view instead of trying to reach a consensus.
Now, talking about the scenario in the Vila Health activity, it could be easily noticed that IT and the management departments do not communicate efficiently with nurses, who are supposed to use the computer system Healthix. This statement is inferred from nurses complaints of their unawareness of how to use the program and its user-unfriendliness. Thus, the program’s installation led to the irrational allocation of human resources since nurses must spend time dealing with the program that they do not like instead of taking care of patients. Besides, even though an implementation coach was hired to teach the nurses to use Healthix, the medical staff still had issues with the program after these courses. This way, the employment of the coach was a waste of money.
Leadership has an essential role in the success of the interprofessional collaboration. It seems to be a good idea for a leader to show high professionalism and moral standards. Regan, Laschinger, and Wong (2016) call such a leader an authentic one. This chief would be able to motivate subordinates to become committed to what they do and build an atmosphere of trust in the team. Among the best interdisciplinary collaboration practices, Liu, Gerdtz, and Manias (2016) identify an extensive use of communication strategies between the clinicians. The authors claim that language discourse allows them to ensure patients safety (Liu et al., 2016). To sum up, from the works cited above, it could be concluded that a genuine leader and the communication between all staff members and patients is key to the successful practice of a team of specialists from distinct fields.
References
Liu, W., Gerdtz, M., & Manias, E. (2016). Creating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and patient-centered care: how nurses, doctors, pharmacists and patients use communication strategies when managing medications in an acute hospital setting. Journal of clinical nursing, 25(19-20), 2943-2957.
O’Connor, P., O’Dea, A., Lydon, S., Offiah, G., Scott, J., Flannery, A., Lang, B., Hoban, A., Armstrong, C., Byrne, D. (2016). A mixed-methods study of the causes and impact of poor teamwork between junior doctors and nurses. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 28(3), 339-345.
Regan, S., Laschinger, H. K., & Wong, C. A. (2016). The influence of empowerment, authentic leadership, and professional practice environments on nurses’ perceived interprofessional collaboration. Journal of Nursing Management, 24(1), E54-E61.