Importance Of Inter-Professional Collaboration In Healthcare

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In an effort to double or even triple the responsiveness of healthcare delivery systems, interprofessional collaboration should not be overlooked. A proper understanding of interprofessional collaboration among health regulators, educators, professionals, and professional associations is important. It familiarizes them with interprofessional relationships in their aim to tackle difficult health problems, which increase on a daily basis. Interprofessional collaboration is the process of establishing and sustaining an interprofessional working relationship among students, practitioners, or patients in an effective manner to optimize the provision of healthcare services. Collaborative elements include trust, respect, partnership, and shared decision-making.
Healthcare organizations that adopt this important aspect in their healthcare delivery models have an advantage in providing better service to their patients. Close interaction with healthcare professionals enables patients to make well-informed choices about managing their health. Often referred to as collective responsibility, the greatest impact happens when every health professional is involved in providing healthcare solutions. This includes medical experts working both within and outside their line of duty by assisting other healthcare professionals in providing their services. Through consistent sharing of information and experience among medical staff and with patients, complex medical problems and uncertainties concerning health choices and their outcomes are made easy, resulting in the delivery of quality healthcare. However, the inter-professional collaborative approach has its drawbacks. Communication difficulties can contribute to critical medical information being communicated ineffectively and inaccurately among healthcare professionals.
Patients also benefit from inter-professional collaborative models by acquiring quality services from the medical team. This builds confidence and trust among patients towards clinicians and nurses who develop a reliable patient-provider relationship and great understanding of their emotional situations. In addition, it develops a meaningful relationship between patients and medical professionals since this model focuses on them as primary stakeholders in healthcare objectives (Bridges et al., 2011).

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