Teamwork in Healthcare
Teamwork in Healthcare
Scholarly Activities
Overview
Teamwork is an approach healthcare providers adopt to enhance cooperation in healthcare. It is currently recognized as a practice competency providers should develop and a measure to elevate quality in healthcare. Research shows that medical care accomplished through interdisciplinary cooperation is linked to high-quality care, increased patient safety, lower rehospitalization rates, and reduced medical errors and associated consequences, such as readmissions and complications (Rawlinson et al., 2021). Care coordination and patient access to healthcare services rely on effective interdisciplinary collaboration (Samuriwo, 2022). I participated in an interdisciplinary committee meeting to enhance collaboration and communication between nurses, physicians, physician assistants, and pharmacists to prevent medication error rates at the hospital. The meeting was held on 12th April 2023, and in attendance were APNs and APPs, including CNMs, CRNAs, NPs, physicians, physician assistants, and pharmacists. Members of the Board of Registered Nursing and the Medical Executive Committee were also present.
Problem
Despite the deployment of electronic health records (EHRs), clinical decision support systems (CDSSs), and computerized provider order entry (CPOE) at the hospital, medication errors are still a problem because human input is still critical to the accuracy of these systems. The success of these systems depends on cooperation between healthcare providers in direct contact with the patient (Manias, 2018). The meeting intended to devise ways to improve interdisciplinary collaboration and care coordination to minimize miscommunication, misunderstanding, and human errors identified as contributing significantly to medication errors that expose patients to adverse drug events and reactions and put the hospital at risk of increased legal cases.
Intervention
The meeting was successful, and members agreed on potential strategies for improving interdisciplinary collaboration. These strategies will be integrated into policy, standardized procedures, and standards of care. The effectiveness of these strategies will be reviewed monthly, and the committee will decide on a way forward per the review’s outcomes. To enhance interdisciplinary collaboration, members agreed to:
- Improve communication practices and increasing communication channels to suit everyone’s preferred communication approach
- Encourage giving and receiving feedback
- Establish a platform for social interaction
- Integrate collaboration into daily tasks and all projects at the hospital
- Promote open communication among providers
- Encourage sharing knowledge, insights, and resources
- Cultivate a culture of mutual respect and trust among all team members
The committee agreed on a training program that will take two months to help providers develop these competencies and understand how to implement them in their daily practice. It will be on-practice training, and a self-evaluation test will be conducted at the end of the training to determine whether providers achieved their respective objectives.
The meeting was an opportunity to learn about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in healthcare delivery, barriers to effective interdisciplinary collaboration, and approaches that can help enhance collaboration and care coordination. I learned that every team member is responsible for ensuring compliance with agreed-upon solutions and adopting them to promote quality of care and patient safety. This meeting serves as appropriate monitoring of competency and ongoing professional practice evaluation to identify issues affecting the quality of service and devise ways to address them. I plan to engage in such meetings in the future and be an active leader in enhancing the quality of care and patient safety. Program competencies addressed in this meeting include promoting interprofessional collaborative communication with healthcare teams to ensure care quality and safety, participating in policy development and adoption, and engaging in critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and decision-making.
References
Manias E. (2018). Effects of interdisciplinary collaboration in hospitals on medication errors: an integrative review. Expert opinion on drug safety, 17(3), 259–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/14740338.2018.1424830
Rawlinson, C., Carron, T., Cohidon, C., Arditi, C., Hong, Q. N., Pluye, P., Peytremann-Bridevaux, I., & Gilles, I. (2021). An Overview of Reviews on Interprofessional Collaboration in Primary Care: Barriers and Facilitators. International journal of integrated care, 21(2), 32. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijic.5589
Samuriwo R. (2022). Interprofessional Collaboration-Time for a New Theory of Action?. Frontiers in medicine, 9, 876715. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2022.876715
