Personal Philosophy Innovation and Leadership

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 workers (Van Dongen et al., 2017).

Collaboration can help solve difficult challenges, provide solutions quickly, or lead to new ideas faster. 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 or because things are changing too fast is unhelpful. It could lead to conflict, leading to a team missing a solution, a treatment option, or a diagnosis. It could also lead to medical errors (Mathena, 2002).

For a team to collaborate properly, everyone needs to accept that to err human and that conflicts are also human. When a team member makes an error, it is important to handle the situation correctly, focus on correcting the mistake, and ensure it does not happen again. Concerning the conflict, disagreement can be useful if used to redo things and make things work better for everyone. In many cases, the solution to conflicts is often a smart compromise in which everyone\\\\\\\'s interests are taken on board. It isn\\\\\\\'t easy to have a situation where a team shares the same cultural preferences, religion, political views, and race/ethnicity. Therefore, disagreements will almost always occur. Nevertheless, rather than worrying about differences, a team leader should recognize the power of diversity and encourage everyone to contribute and share their ideas and solutions while avoiding groupthink (Mathena, 2002).

Successful collaboration requires integrating organizational and interpersonal skills. These skills also include interpersonal attributes like self-confidence and cooperation, together with process-skills akin to systems-thinking. Additionally, it depends on several other foundational skills like communication and conflict management. Moreover, communication is considered the number one transformative skillset that nurses ought to possess and continuously refine. Communication enhances interaction and develops relationships with not only other healthcare professionals but also patients. And it\\\\\\\'s also crucial for maintaining high-quality patient care and its role in shaping and impacting process and outcome.

Influence of Participation and Collaboration in Patient Care

Every professional\\\\\\\'s expertise is based on their educational background and individual experiences. However, when multiple professionals work together, they combine their different backgrounds, skills, training, and experiences to produce more informed perspectives on situations and better plans to address them. When patients or their relatives add their voice in inter-professional team meetings, they also add to the overall perspective. Because of the diversity of perspectives in inter-professional teams, such teams are more capable of being innovative, efficient, and effective than functional teams with no patient participation. Combining perspectives, considerations, ideas, and even discussion of compromises can help minimize costs, avoid errors, and avoid miscommunication. This is very important in situations where team members might have different goals or opinions (Paul & Peterson, 2002).

In healthcare, miscommunication has almost always resulted in disastrous consequences from misdiagnoses to missed symptoms, medication errors, and even death. It has been predicted that medical errors lead to about a quarter-million deaths annually. According to some studies, it is one of the leading causes of death in America. Since when a patient enters a health facility, they normally end up interacting with several health professionals, accidents can happen at any stage. This is why inter-professional collaboration is important because it helps professionals to think together, plan together, and work together for the collective goal of restoring the health of patients safely and ethically (Paul & Peterson, 2002).

In healthcare, interprofessional collaboration has been proven to be very beneficial. Its benefits include better patient outcomes, lower healthcare costs, better patient experience, and reduced medication errors. Inter-professional collaboration also helps hospitals to save money by improving operational efficiency and reducing workflow redundancies. For example, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study revealed in 2002 that by enhancing inter-professional collaboration, a hospital was able to reduce the average length of hospital stays, reduce its fall rate, increase its bed turn, and increase its pre-noon bed discharges. The same study revealed that inter-professional collaboration significantly reduced delays and shorted surgical start times. Each healthcare profession is unique with its philosophy, knowledge base, and subculture. When power structures are added, some voices end up not being heard, affecting staff morale. Inter-professional collaboration can help to make everyone equal and ensure every voice is heard. This can improve morale, sense of belonging, job satisfaction, and patient satisfaction (Paul & Peterson, 2002).

Application of Participation and Collaboration in Nursing

It is critical to note that the extreme sides of team integration. On one side, there can be an inter-professional team in which the functional teams are psychologically and physically disconnected. The team can pass information between members or sub-teams without sharing important information, discussing important information, or innovating. On the other side, there can be found an inter-professional team that is very well bound by the same values, goals, openness, trust, and interdependency. The team can work on tasks together or by delegating it to sub-teams. The number one thing that characterizes good inter-professional teams is their interconnected work process and their ability to share inputs and outputs, communicate clearly and properly, and negotiate goals and achieve them. In the long term, good inter-professional teams can gain the capacity for capability generation, process improvement, and organizational learning (Morley & Cashell, 2017).

Collaboration can improve patient engagement, patient education, patient involvement in self-care, and patient involvement in healthcare teams\\\\\\\' decision-making. When patients are invited to contribute at meetings, it is important to understand their options or choices clearly and that the approaches in communicating to them are responsive and consistent. In the constantly evolving healthcare delivery industry, patients become the main deciders for medical decision-making. Simultaneously, doctors and other health professionals must play more of a supportive role (Morley & 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).