Journal of interprofessional care
-
Collaborative, team-based, interprofessional approaches to patient management are becoming increasingly recognized as beneficial to health outcomes. This project aimed to develop interprofessional skills among 134 third year medical students that were of clinical educational value to the students, and through activities that directly benefited the rural health professionals in their daily work. Placements were undertaken during a six week rural clinical attachment, mainly throughout South-West Queensland. ⋯ Results showed that over 80% of the health professional group reported the medical student placements were useful. Similarly, almost 80% of medical students reported positive changes in their attitude to other health professionals from the placement, and 91% indicated they had derived clinical educational benefit from their interprofessional activity. Despite difficulties due to poor communication between the various parties involved, the project proved successful in improving medical students' skills, knowledge and perceptions concerning interprofessional practice, through a placement and educational project which delivered practical benefits to rural health professionals and rural communities.
-
Accidents in health care are mainly due to systemic communication errors. Errors occur more frequently in the operating theatre (OT) than other clinical settings. Hence, it is important that preventive communication practices are adopted in OT teams. ⋯ In comparison with other OT practitioners, surgeons generally reported differing perceptions of the meaning and value of briefing, often holding broad notions of what constitutes a "brief", but also showing scepticism towards briefing. However, surgeons who had introduced briefing reported positive results such as greater efficiency, shared understanding, and increased team morale. Collaborative briefing that extends beyond the technical to include the interpersonal could be initiated in principle by any member of the OT team, but a number of factors inhibit this, and surgeons play a pivotal role in establishing briefing.
-
The aim of this paper is to investigate ways in which the dynamics of interprofessional work shaped older patients' "participation" in decision-making about discharge from acute hospital care in a medical directorate of a District General Hospital in Scotland. Twenty-two purposively selected older patients and their key professional hospital carers in three different ward environments participated in the study. An ethnographic approach was adopted, involving semi-structured interviews with patients and staff combined with rigorous observation of the practical context for staff and patient interactions during the discharge planning process over a 5-month period. ⋯ Care routines, which centred around assessments and the decisions that flowed from these tended to exclude both staff and patients from active decision-making. Research and practice on patient involvement in discharge decision-making needs to focus on the organizational context, which shapes patients', unpaid carers' and staff's interactions and the dynamics by which some views are privileged and others excluded. Procedurally driven care routines and their impact on patients', carers' and staff's opportunity to actively engage in decision-making should be re-considered from an empowerment perspective.
-
Maximizing interprofessional collaborative patient-centred practice holds promise for improving patient care and creating satisfying work roles. In Canada's evolving health care system, there are demands for increased efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and quality improvement. Interprofessional collaboration warrants re-examination because maximizing interprofessional collaboration, especially nurse-physician collaboration, holds promise for improving patient care and creating satisfying work roles. ⋯ This pilot study suggests that a person-centred model, when focused on the physician-nurse dyad, may offer improved efficiency, job satisfaction and continuity of care on a palliative care unit. Incorporating all team members and developing strategies to successfully expand the model across the whole unit are the next challenges. Further research into the impact of these changes on the health care professionals, management and patients and families is essential.
-
A multi-faceted, longitudinal and prospective collaborative inquiry was initiated in December 2002 with one half of the cohort of operating theatre personnel in a large, acute UK hospital serving a mainly rural population. The same intervention was introduced in January 2004 to the other half of the cohort. ⋯ The aggregate of individual, unidirectional attitude changes across a large cohort constitutes a change in climate. This shift challenges the conventional culture of multiprofessionalism, where uniprofessional identification (the "silo" mentality) is traditionally strong.