Working Together to Improve Patient Safety

Clark, & Greenawald. (2013). Nurse-Physician leadership: Insights into interprofessional collaboration. JONA: The journal of Nursing Administration, 43(12),  653–659. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0000000000000007

This article shares the importance of nurses and physicians working together to provide the best care for their patients. Failures of communication are      reported as a leading cause of sentinel events. Often times, the nurse and physician are the ones who have direct patient interaction and must work together to ensure the patient is cared for properly. As reported in this article, physicians and nurses have their own idea of what care the patient needs and are working separately to achieve these goals. Physicians and nurses were both interviewed to determine what they believe is effective communication, what the barriers to communication are, and how they think communication can be improved. This list is compiled and solutions to the majority problems are offered, solutions that can be implemented in any healthcare institution to improve communication between nurses and physicians. This article proves to be important as nurses and physicians must work together to ensure medication errors do not happen. Nurses administer the medications ordered by the physicians, if they do not have proper communication, then errors that could have been fixed may go unnoticed until a sentinel event happens. 

Reeves, Pelone, Harrison, Goldman, & Zwarenstein. (2018). Interprofessional collaboration to improve professional practice and healthcare outcomes.         Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 6(8), CD000072–CD000072. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858

This study was done to determine how interprofessional collaboration can effect patient health outcomes, whether good or bad. The study is a collaboration of multiple studies to determine if a patients overall health outcome was greater when a team collaboration effort was implemented in the patients care as opposed to a singular effort. Included in the study are ways in which communication may be more effective, such as person-to-person, conference calls, video calls, etc. This article is a good resource to show the positive impact of interprofessional collaboration, that working together as a team can improve patient care and safety. 

Schot, E., Tummers, L., & Noordegraaf, M. (2020). Working on working together. A systematic review on how healthcare professionals contribute to interprofessional collaboration. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 34(3), 332–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2019.1636007

This article discusses the ways in which healthcare professionals collaborate together and the importance of doing so. When we think of team collaboration in a healthcare setting we often think of nurses and physicians working together to improve patient care. However, ensuring the best care for patients requires collaboration between doctors, nurses, dieticians, social workers, pharmacists and management. There are four different types of barriers to proper communication included, these are professional perspectives, social barriers, communicational divides and task divisions. The article then goes on to determine what those barriers mean and how they can be solved. This is a good resource into why there are barriers to interprofessional collaboration and how they can be resolved to better patient care and safety.