Interprofessional Collaboration—Time for a New Theory of Action?

Frontiers in Medicine

article

Ray Samuriwo¹ 

[1] Faculty of Health Studies, School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership, University of Bradford

关键词: interprofessional collaboration;    systems thinking;    muddy zone of practice;    theory of action;    healthcare professions education;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fmed.2022.876715

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) is integral to the quality, equity, justice, and safety of healthcare (1–3). Having a diverse group of healthcare professionals engaged in IPC with different backgrounds, insights and perspectives increases the chances of generating unique and innovative solutions to challenges that often arise with regards to care quality in clinical practice. However, there is a long history of shortcomings in IPC that have a deleterious impact on patient safety arising from conflict relating to professional boundaries, license, jurisdiction, and mandate between different healthcare professionals, such as doctors and nurses (4–14). These recurring narratives about the relationships between doctors and nurses, who are in two of the oldest healthcare professions, highlight the challenges that exist in facilitating IPC which achieves the lofty aim of consistently delivering safe, high-quality care to all in a just and equitable manner. Efforts to improve IPC have mainly relied on interprofessional education, learning, or leadership interventions to foster a collegiate and integrated approach to the healthcare in which the contribution of people from different disciplines is valued (15–18). The success of IPC improvement efforts based on interprofessional education, learning, and leadership has been mixed (18–23). The reported variation in the efficacy of different interprofessional education and learning efforts in bringing about IPC may be due to the focus on teaching and upskilling individuals, groups, or teams from different professions with the objective of making them more collaborative. It is worth considering the nature of context in which IPC takes place and some of the factors that are at play which may account of the mixed results of improvement efforts.

【 授权许可】

CC BY