Importance Of Interprofessional Collaboration

With the growing complexity of healthcare system, interprofessional collaboration in healthcare has become increasingly important. Interprofessional collaboration is the practice of working, communicating and sharing responsibilities among healthcare professions for the benefit of patients and professions. Throughout workshops and clinical placements, I was exposed to an interprofessional collaborative environment. During an MDT, I saw surgeons create treatment plans by assessing the patient fitness for surgery preoperatively and perform surgery while postoperative management and rehabilitation involve other professions.

Formerly, doctor was known as the major decision maker. However, nowadays through interprofessional collaboration, healthcare members from different disciplines such as physiotherapy, dietetics, pharmacy,

By reviewing patients’ charts solely, doctors might miss symptoms and misdiagnose. However, teamwork and support can reduce pressure and enhance patient outcome.

The most common barrier to interprofessional collaboration is the lack of understanding of role, responsibilities, knowledge, and skill of each other profession. This causes lack of confidence and trust in each other’s opinion which reduces clinical effectiveness and patient safety. Each profession from diverse backgrounds with clashing perceptions and reluctance to accept others’ views could cause conflicts. Another hurdle is the unequal number of each profession and the team not composed of appropriate professionals.

Ineffective communication causes lack of commitment and insufficient decision-making. This could be seen through medical errors such as misunderstanding of information, inaccurate and lack of clarity of medication which increase patient safety risk. Another problem is the difficulty to arrange a schedule of different profession for meetings which might be