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Commission to Build a Healthier America Public Meeting
Join the Commission on June 19, 2013 for a public meeting to raise awareness of how non-medical factors influence health and move public- an...
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What Can Be Done to Encourage More Interprofessional Collaboration in Health Care?
Most health care providers today were educated in silos with only those from their own profession. Few were trained to work as part of integrated teams. But when providing patient care, they must interact with providers from other professions to share information, execute quality and safety checks and help patients understand and comply with treatment plans.
Research has long suggested that collaboration improves coordination, communication and, ultimately, the quality and safety of patient care. It utilizes both the individual and collective skills and experience of team members, allowing them to function more effectively and deliver a higher level of services than each would working alone. To date, this kind of care has not been widely implemented outside of discrete settings such as intensive care units, trauma and transplant teams.
- Collaboration between doctors, nurses and other health care providers—known as interprofessional collaboration—is not the norm in health care today.
- Interprofessional collaboration holds promise for reducing medical errors, improving the quality of care and meeting the needs of diverse populations.
- We can increase interprofessional collaboration by educating doctors, nurses and other health professionals together, and by retraining providers to work together.
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View allInterprofessional collaboration linked to improved quality and safety of patient care