Collaborative Practice In Health Care

According to the World Health Organization, Collaborative practice in health care for instance nursing, occurs when numerous health workers from various professional backgrounds provide comprehensive services by working together with patients, their families, care-givers and communities to deliver the best quality of care across settings (CAN, 2011). The elements of collaborative practice include accountability, responsibility, communication, assertiveness, co-operation, co-ordination, mutual respect and trust. These interactions reveal a blend of professional cultures, which are achieved by sharing of knowledge and skills to improve the care of the patient (Bridges et al, 2011). The video I watched was on Collaboration-Interprofessional Competency.

It was a clear display of the lack of communication that can occur among healthcare givers, which may reflect negatively on the institution and in the process, may confound the patient causing medical errors. Succinctly, this paper seeks to suggest attitudes and behavioral approaches required to improve the communication conduct among professionals as well as find an analysis and solutions for the above mentioned problem.
The Canadian Association of Nurses suggests that there is credible evidence to demonstrate that Interprofessional collaborative patient-centered practices can positively affect the recent health issues such as rural and remote accessibility, planning of human resources, primary healthcare, waiting times among others.

For this reason, it is imperative that individuals improve communication among these stakeholders. In the course of 4days in a hospital, a patient can come into contact with about 50 different employees including nurses, technicians and physicians. As a result, for effective clinical practice, critical information MUST be passed on with complete accuracy. According to Rosenstein & O’Daniel 2008, some of the obstacles to Interprofessional Collaboration and Communication include Gender, hierarchy, differences in languages and jargon, the diverse levels of preparation, qualifications and status, the complexity of the care, the historical Interprofessional and Interprofessional contentions, differences in professional routines and agenda, the emphasis on quick decision-making, the fear of diluting one’s professional identity among others. Additionally, those who have the most barriers tend to be physicians and nurses. Despite their numerous interactions in one day, they have differing perceptions about their responsibilities and roles concerning the requirements the patient may have so they end up having different goals for the patient. Due to the ethnic diversity

that is present across the United States, the professionals are a reflection of this cultural backgrounds and this can be a source of conflicts among them.
(Rosenstein & O’Daniel, 2008) suggest models and ways of improving and bridging this communication gap.

One of them is the Crew Resource Management (CRM) present in the Aviation field that experts have come up. It is safety training that focuses team management that is very effective. The CRM programs essentially educate the crew members on how human competency may be limited. The operational perceptions emphasized include examination, promotion, seeking information related to operations, communicating projected exploits, decision-making and conflict resolution. The improvements on the safety records, which were observed after the implementation of this new safety training on commercial aviation, were tremendous compared to the previous record where 70 percent of the commercial flight accidents were as a result poor communication among crew members. Secondly, there is the Kaiser Permanente, SABR (Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation) Tool 2002 which reveals that indeed doctors and nurses more often than not have different communication styles partly owing to their training. Physicians are taught to be concise while nurses to be able to vividly describe medical conditions. SABR was created by a physician co-coordinator of the informatics at the Kaiser Permanente, Michael Leonard together with his colleagues and it has been used vastly in the healthcare systems, one of them being the Kaiser Permanente. It provides a framework of communication between medical

team members concerning the condition of the patient. It is a tool that is easy to remember and useful for creating mechanisms to frame any conversation, specifically a critical situation that requires urgency in action and attention by a clinician. SABR permits easy and a focused way of setting expectations between the associates as to what is to be communicated and how it will be communicated. This is very important for the transference of information as well as harmonious team work. There is therefore familiarity in communication as well as development of skills. An example is critical thinking whereby, before communicating to another team member, the individual is able to provide his/her own assessment of the issue and what they think is an appropriate solution. Thirdly, there is the Situation Task Intent Concern Calibrate (STICC), which is used by the Forest Service in the U.S to firefighters to provide guidance during situations. It involves five stages: the Situation-what one is facing, Task- what should be done, Intent-why, Concern- what one should be keen on and Calibrate- communicate to one another. If one does not understand or cannot do what should be done or can see something others cannot see they point it out. Finally it is important for an institution to encourage a culture, which emphatically supports communication, and team collaboration especially in a sensitive field such as the healthcare where proper flow of information is lacks can lead to colossal ramifications.
CAN 2011 outlines that there are particular principles that guide collaboration among professionals and professions which include: client-centered care to promote prevention and management of health, access by client to health providers at any given time, evidence-informed decision-making to promote quality care, epidemiology to determine the effect of treatment using demographics to assess clients and relevance of treatments, ethics and finally communication because active listening as well as effective communication skills guarantee good decision-making and effortless flow of information sharing.