Where are you in the collaboration stakes in healthcare?
Jenny Crompton
Helping senior nurses and allied health professionals, manage the challenges of working relationships, so they can reduce stress and anxiety in the workplace.
Collaboration between healthcare professionals in all its guises has been implemented and discussed successfully for many years.
I was reading an article this week from 2020, and was curious to find out how you feel interprofessional collaboration has progressed as senior nurses or AHP's?
This paper discovered 3 conceptual categories:
1) Bridging gaps
2) Negotiating overlaps
3) Creating spaces
As these authors state, collaboration is much more than policies, procedures and processes, as a means to get the work done.
Whilst there are fabulous achievements demonstrated in improving services when professionals work together effectively. I would suggest that the challenges you face currently are varied and changeable, and nowadays you need the skill set to adapt and achieve the objectives you require. For you, for your patients, and for your organisation.
It's dependant on the diversity of the work force, hierarchical influences, distinct professional cultures, the development of new roles and the protection of the old. The blurring of professional boundaries, along with gender or generational differences. Or working in an organisation where psychological safety is not high on the agenda.
How else is collaboration affected?
- Traditional hierarchies can impede open communication and decision making, with power imbalances causing other professionals to hesitate voicing their opinions. Particularly when negative behaviours or practices are being demonstrated.
- There may be unclear delineation of responsibilities between different professions. causing disputes over scopes of practice. Or a reluctance to share information between individual professions, or departments. Even within the same professions this can happen, knowledge is power etc etc…
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- Collaboration will have its triumphs and its challenges, as the advent of new roles achieve a firm foothold in todays healthcare workforce.
- As senior nurses and AHP’s you work in highly stressed, ever changing and demanding clinical areas. The increasingly heavy workloads and time constraints limit your opportunities to have those collaborative discussions.
- There will always be those that are resistance to change. (We can all be guilty of this, particularly when information has previously been withheld). Staff maybe comfortable with traditional ways of working, and therefore become reluctant to collaborate when they have not been involved.
- As health professionals, you end up with all manner of preconceived ideas about professional relationships, traditions and jurisdictions. With those all too familiar, different approaches to patient care.
There is a big chunk of work you can achieve within your roles to improve collaboration, where conflicts might have arisen for the reasons highlighted, and no doubt there are many more examples you have experienced.
So what can you achieve? – loads!!
It is important to understand that collaboration between professionals is multifaced and dynamic, and efforts must be evaluated at regular intervals to improve the likelihood of success.
It requires improvisation and negotiation in managing the challenges once identified, and an in depth level of self-awareness as to how each and everyone of you contribute to it's achievement.
As the old saying goes: There is no "I" in teams, but there is an "E" for everyone (Robert Cheeke).
We are all just cogs in a wheel!
If you would like to discuss your professional relationship challenges, then drop me a message to arrange.
#seniornurse #AHP #coaching