Collaboration is the cornerstone of success in any team. Interprofessional collaboration is one of the trademarks of several highly successful health care innovations. When nurses collaborate as equals with other health care providers, patient outcomes and quality of care tend to improve. It also improves the coordination and communication between the healthcare professionals and thus in turn, improves the quality and safety of patient care. How many times we have heard the expression; “two heads are better than one?” This interprofessional collaboration approach allows both the individual and collective skills and experience of team members to function together, more effectively and deliver a higher level of services than each would working alone.

Since nurses know the patients more, on a daily-day basis when they are hospitalized, they know what works and doesn’t work for the patients. By sharing this information with the providers, the nurses and health care providers can come with the s suitable plan that actually works for this particular patient.

“The concept of collaboration is commonly defined through five underlying concepts: sharing, partnership, power, interdependency and process” (D’Amour, 2005). The idea of sharing and implies collective action oriented toward a common goal, in this case, improving the quality and safety of patient care.  The notion of the partnership implies to the honest communication, mutual trust, respect and pursuing the common set of goals between the health care professionals, especially the between the nurses and physicians. And so on, all these concepts of collaboration must take place for an effective collaboration to take place. (D’Amour, 2005).

By trusting one another, respecting and working together for a common goal, interprofessional collaboration can easily be achieved in healthcare. This collaboration does help to improve patient care and safety and even implement plan of care and discharge plan. Not only it improves the quality of care, it can reduces costs, especially those associated with re-hospitalization.

References

D’Amour, D., Ferrada-Videla, M., Rodriguez, L., & Beaulieu, M. (2005). The conceptual basis for interprofessional collaboration: core concepts and theoretical frameworks. Journal Of Interprofessional Care, 19116-131.