Diversity is a growing aspect of the healthcare sector. It is essential as it allows nurses and medical services providers to deliver quality health care to patients since they can relate to them. As a result, it has resulted in interprofessional collaboration in healthcare. This is a situation where patient care is approached from a team-based side of view. Thus, herein, the paper will cover how interprofessional collaboration enhances healthcare care quality, reduces medical errors, and also, increase patient safety.
Firstly, interprofessional collaboration improves patient care. For instance, when an individual walks in an emergency department (ED) with severe chest pains, he will first be attended to by an ED doctor. Afterward, he will be referred to a cardiologist who will conduct several tests on the patient and await results from a radiologist who will ascertain the patient is experiencing heart attacks, what the doctor had initially suspected (Gougeon et al., 2017). In this case, the patient will undergo emergency surgery. Afterward, he will spend several hours in the ICU, where a team of nurses will be looking after the patient. Generally, from the time the patient steeped into the hospital's ED, he has been attended to by several professionals, each with different roles. As a result, this is what enhances patient quality.
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Additionally, it has resulted in reduced medical errors. In this case, it is easy to track how medical errors occur when multiple doctors prescribe drugs, and when different nurses deliver these medications. In this case, besides EHR notes, intercommunication plays a vital role in tracking medication processes, helping reduce medical errors, resulting from the adverse reaction of drugs due to multiple prescriptions. However, reduced medical errors will result in patient safety as the hospital staff will be able to mitigate all the possible issues that may result in errors.
Conclusively, several emerging trends result in a change in the nature of interprofessional collaboration. For instance, the use of robots has resulted in the reduced human labor force in hospitals. For example, during surgeries, a robot may be used to position a microscope or cut a bone. Initially, this could have been done with another human. However, with increased AI technology, the use of robotics reduces interprofessional collaboration, thus affecting its nature.
Reference
Gougeon, L., Johnson, J., & Morse, H. (2017). Interprofessional collaboration in health care teams for the maintenance of community-dwelling seniors' health and well-being in Canada: A systematic review of trials. Journal of Interprofessional Education & Practice , 7 , 29-37.
