Introduction

Cooperation between all stakeholders is important to ensure quality, ethical, and compassionate patient care. Without cooperation between nurses and other healthcare professionals, it can be nearly impossible to provide quality patient care. Collaboration is important because it is moral, reinforcing the importance of nursing patients' shared goal back to health. Considering the ever-changing healthcare landscape, the introduction of new technologies, the increasingly complex diseases, and the changing patient population, it is clear that there is a need to reimagine care delivery. To ensure that care providers continue delivering quality and ethical care even in the face of so many changes, efficient and effective leadership is a must. Simply put, the emerging healthcare landscape requires visionaries and efficient leaders because of the many challenges and issues that must be addressed to provide ethical and quality care (Hampton, Smeltzer & Ross, 2020).

Collaboration between healthcare professionals is also beneficial because it improves collaboration between patients and professionals, making care more patient-centered. Because of this, major healthcare facilities usually have policies to ensure patient involvement in their care. Chronic patients almost always have plenty of information about their situation, treatment, recovery, and so on. Therefore, by collaborating with them and involving them fully, multi-disciplinary teams can achieve better outcomes in their situations. The United States Library of Medicine defines patient participation as the full involvement of a patient in making decisions regarding their health situation. Patient participation has been noted as one of the most important elements in the ongoing efforts to reform healthcare delivery as researchers have shown that including patients or family members in the care delivery team often enhances outcomes (Van Dongen et al., 2017).

It has been noted that virtually all inter-professional teams are made only of healthcare professionals and that these professionals tend to focus only on the professional side of things considering everything in their professional capacities. To ensure that patient opinion and perspective are integrated into the care plan, it is important to invite them or their relative to be a part of the care delivery team and attend care team meetings. During the meetings, they should be given a chance to voice their opinions, preferences, values, and needs. They should also be allowed to participate in making decisions about their treatment. Involving patients in care team meetings and in making decisions about their treatment can have several benefits.

According to Wittenberg-Lyles and associates, when patients or their relatives get involved in team meetings, the team's goals tend to be more patient-focused. Also, when patients or their relatives get involved in care delivery teams, they are often allowed to contribute to important decisions, and they almost always report having a good patient experience. Moreover, when patients get involved in care delivery teams, they can add value in increasing trust between themselves or their family and healthcare professionals and increase understanding and openness between patients and healthcare...

This is great because many medical situations are fast-moving and need care providers to act fast and adjust fast when needed. This does not imply that one cannot speak if a proposed solution or idea is not good enough. It just means that collaboration makes it easier to generate new plans quickly, adjust plans, or think of new ways of doing things. But understandably, sometimes collaboration can take time because it works by agreement among parties. Hence it is crucial for those collaborating always to be patient and give collaboration a chance to work. Getting impatient or annoyed because things are moving slowly...

…Cashell, 2017). It is important for healthcare delivery teams to coordinate their instruction methods and educate patients to ensure clarity and consistency. In other words, the interactions between such teams and patients should be structured and collaborative. Still, at the same time, they must be friendly to ensure shared expectations, goals, and values are quickly established. Moreover, there is a need for interactions to create rapport needed for openness, reduced anxiety, and better negotiation (Woo et al., 2017).

Collaborative care delivery teams usually help increase job satisfaction and improve staff retention. The existence of such teams also helps to increase feelings of recognition and empowerment. This is because the teams typically have a horizontal structure instead of the traditional hierarchical organizational structure. Moreover, this structure increases communication, openness, trust, and respect among staff (Emich, 2018). Teams that collaborate well can also innovate, improve processes, improve performance, and reduce cases of absenteeism.

Collaborative practice can be promoted via skills training and collaboration. Two key competencies are required for collaboration. The first one is understanding role expectations and boundaries in teams and understanding how to balance team identity needs and professional identity needs. This competency emphasizes collaboration and cooperation in place of professional needs. It also promotes a patient-focused care model. The second competency needed is to communicate effectively, formally and informally, and conflict resolution and negotiation skills. These skills can help ensure collaboration between people from diverse professional and training backgrounds (Morley & Cashell, 2017).

Conclusion

A collaborative multi-disciplinary team can bring about innovation, process improvement, organizational efficiency, staff satisfaction, patient engagement, and high-quality, comprehensive care. Learning about collaborative inter-professional teams is rewarding and challenging at the same time. Nevertheless, through training and education, key competencies such as effective communication and collaboration can be learned to ensure great teamwork.

References

Emich, C. (2018). Conceptualizing collaboration in nursing. InNursing…