By definition, an interprofessional partnership is a power-sharing collaboration between health and social care persons in medical education, research, practice, and organization, for the purpose of achieving the best results.
The need for effective collaboration is seen in the treatment of chronic diseases. While the role of physicians in a patient’s recovery cannot be emphasized enough, full recovery requires a level of patient involvement that is very hard to facilitate without nursing human resources. Collaboration between these two medical directions has shown to result in the care of better quality, as well as a positive response from the patient. Additionally, nurse-led medical teams have proven to be effective at optimizing expenses, while maintaining comfortable capacity (Jacobson, 2012, p. ii).
In my experience, interprofessional collaborations have had a very positive effect on organizational healthcare. Full, symbiotic collaboration between nurses, physicians, regulators, and patients with their families is vital for getting efficient client-centered health care. It positively impacts such issues as patient waiting time and safety, human resource planning, primary health care and general well-being of both the patients and the medical staff. The latter can deal better with workloads, with an improved, but less straining, patient workflow, and can defer responsibilities to the suitable members of the team or share the responsibility where their areas of expertise overlap.
There are some difficulties in making this system work. Different professions rely on distinct value systems. Nurses and physicians, for example, might be aiming for different outcomes in their line of work. One of the main struggles of interprofessional collaboration is to remove barriers between people of different medical professions, achieve a common perspective of issues at hand and learn to trust and respect others on their team (Flicek, 2012, p.385)
Staff members from different medical spheres are often conditioned during their training to be self-sufficient and to focus communication on their colleagues and patients in their care. However, patients can have very diverse needs and often require specialized professional care. Due to different self-images and responsibilities, these professionals might clash in the workplace. This can be seen in the example of nurses and doctors, who have a history of tension and rigid hierarchy. The doctors were often allowed to be dismissive and disruptive towards the work efforts of the nurses, rarely feeling the obligation to join efforts. Also, nurses and physicians use dissimilar vocabulary and are taught to communicate diagnoses differently.
This often results in stunted communication between different levels of patient care, which hurts the patients first and foremost (Shannon & Myers, 2009, para. 14-19). It is important to introduce change into the current situation to improve interprofessional collaboration. First of all, a more patient-centric organizational culture, where the idea of nurses and physicians as partners would be promoted, with patients as customers. In order to subvert the harmful hierarchy, it would be necessary to introduce policies that would discourage or even punish inadequate and dismissive behavior. Secondly, it would be a good idea to propose tools and technologies to support communication, for example, training and communicational software. A lot of responsibility for creating a functioning team would lie on its leader. If she wants to succeed, a nurse leader would have to be able to see the importance of embracing the differences of team members and cultivating an environment where they share their skills. Such a leader would have to inspire innovation from the team. And encourage them to work together on implementing new ideas. Finally, it is essential that the leader is not afraid to delegate responsibilities to others, and cultivate trust in the group (Llopis, 2014)
References
Flicek, C. L. (2012). Communication: A Dynamic Between Nurses and Physicians. MEDSURG Nursing, 21(6), 385-387. Web.
Jacobson, P. M. (2012). Evidence Synthesis for the Effectiveness of Interprofessional Teams in Primary Care. Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, ii-24. Web.
Llopis, G. (2014).5 Ways Leaders Enable Innovation In Their Teams. Web.
Shannon, D. W., & Myers, L. A. (2009). Nurse-to-Physician Communications: Connecting for Safety. Web.