Interdisciplinary Learning & Collaboration with Technology

Using collaboration to promote an interdisciplinary approach working towards a common goal has been shown to improve the overall patient experience. The Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals reflect the importance of collaboration in promoting and maintaining patient safety. Collaboration and interdisciplinary relationships do not come naturally to patient care providers. However these relationships can be improved upon with practice, and an improved understanding of the interdisciplinary roles, and their contributions to the patient care goals.

According to Dillon, Noble, and Kaplan (2009), the cause of most patient related errors occur due to interdisciplinary communication failures. Recognizing that most health care disciplines were responding to patient needs as “silos” as opposed to a recommended model of an interdisciplinary “synergy”, The Joint Commission, the IOM, The World Health Organization, and the AACN have recommended an interdisciplinary educational model. The QSEN Institute has a faculty resource module that advocates patient safety by promoting an interprofessional education (IPE), and providing examples of IPE activities for faculty. Technology opportunities such as High Fidelity Patient Simulation (HFPS) and virtual world, or other serious play experiences can be easily adapted for IPE.

I have been blessed in my career to have had exemplary interdisciplinary relationships advocating for common patient care goals. Our interdisciplinary team consists of a core group of representatives from medicine, nursing, social work, OT/PT, speech and swallow therapy, nutrition, child life, community health nursing, and chaplain services, that meets weekly. This interdisciplinary group addresses short term and long term patient and family needs; including immediate and long-term health care needs; determining discharge planning criteria; family support; addressing financial and social supports; tutoring needs; as well as, potential home care needs. Unfortunately, as an interprofessional group we recognize that this relationship has taken almost 10 years to be established. We all agree that this relationship would have flourished many years ago, if IPE had been incorporated into each of our educational programs, as each of us graduated from or respective educational programs as “silos” and have had to grow into an interprofessional group advocating for our common goal-patient safety and the administration of quality care.

Activities such as HFPS that include student-professionals from multiple patient care  disciplines, offer excellent communication  building, and team work opportunities. There are  many examples of simulated interdisciplinary  patient code examples available on the intranet,  however many do not demonstrate the imperative post-debriefing of the simulation exercise. As the IOM, AACN, WHO, and The Joint Commission have recognized, the time to include IPE into our professional curricula has come.

Reference

Dillon, P. M., Noble, K. A., & Kaplan, L. (2009). Simulation as a means to     foster collaborative interdisciplinary education. Nursing Education Perspectives, 30, (2), 87-90.