Collaboration In Health Care

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In 2012, the Department of Health (DoH) presented the ‘6 Cs’, a set of six core values which underpin everything that nursing, midwifery and care staff do. They include care, compassion, competence, communication, courage and commitment. However more recently there have been calls on the NHS to add a seventh C: collaboration. As Wiltjer (2017) argues, “current best practice in nursing is rooted in person-centred care, shared decision-making and multidisciplinary teamwork” and that care based on these principles “requires extensive collaboration between professionals, as well as between professionals, patients and relatives”. Gluyas (2014) also advocates a collaborative approach, explaining that “teams comprise individuals who must work together …show more content…

As Ryan (2016) puts it, “each member of the team has specialist skills and expertise, yet all members work together to achieve the optimum health outcomes for the patient”. The goal of a healthcare team is to promote and protect the health of the patient, and where teams work collaboratively and have a common understanding of their own and others’ roles and responsibilities, this “enables… individuals to identify changes in the clinical situation and adapt their response, where necessary, to achieve the desired goals” (Ryan, 2016). A collaborative multidisciplinary team will therefore be able to effectively delegate tasks based on ability and expertise, improve workload management and team …show more content…

As discussed, it is a fundamental duty of healthcare practitioners to promote a person-centred approach to care. In line with this has been a shift away from the traditional medical approach to care, which focused primarily on the patient’s illness or condition, and more towards a holistic assessment of patient health and wellbeing. However as Wiltjer (2017) proposes, “limited time, staff and resources in the NHS can result in a disease-centred approach being used and the medical aspects of care being prioritised”, resulting in the psychosocial assessment of a person’s health needs being neglected and thus falling short of a whole-person assessment. Savage and Moore (2004) suggest that teamworking may be hindered by “ambiguity… about the nature and extent of the accountability of different professional groups jointly involved in decision-making”. If individuals involved in collaborative teamwork neither understand their own roles and responsibilities, nor those of others, the team will be unable to work cohesively. Understanding one another’s roles may be linked to perceived hierarchical standing between healthcare professionals. Daiski (2004) argues that there are residual perceptions from the origins of nursing, when female nurses were considered subordinate to male physicians, and that a sense of disparity and unequal power between roles still exists.

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