- Interprofessional care – comprehensive health services provided by multiple caregivers working collaboratively – is important in all health-care settings to enhance health outcomes and patients/clients experiences, reduce costs and improve the work environment for all providers.
- Interprofessional teams work with patients/clients as they move across health-care sectors, whether that’s from long term care to acute care, or in the community or at home.
- The focus of this best practice guideline is to help you develop your role on your interprofessional team.
- Interprofessional care was a response to a variety of changes, including increasingly complex patients/clients, limited resources, shifting demographics and changing laws, priorities and mandates.
- In the Conceptual Model for Developing and Sustaining Interprofessional Care (Figure 2), exemplary interprofessional care in a healthy work environment is a product of synergy among health-care teams, who demonstrate expertise in its six key domains, which are:
- Care expertise;
- Shared power;
- Collaborative leadership;
- Optimizing profession, role and scope;
- Shared decision making; and
- Effective group functioning.
- The domains are supported by competent communication and the three foundational components of the healthy work environment model:
- Policy, physical, structural;
- Professional/occupational; and
- Cognitive/psycho/social/cultural.
- The six domains are fundamental for transforming work environments to a collaborative interprofessional environment, while the foundational components support and influence each domain to achieve the goal of exemplary interprofessional care for patients/clients and their support networks.
- Interprofessional care requires collaboration between health-care professionals and patients/clients and their families and circles of care, in order to identify and take advantage of each professional’s care expertise.
- Shared power happens when each team member is open to letting others influence patients/clients care regardless of their educational or professional preparation.
- Collaborative leadership (also called reciprocal or shared leadership) is a people- and relationship-focused approach based on the premise that answers should be found in the collective (the team).
- Exemplary interprofessional care lets all team members work to their full scope of practice, and takes advantages of the synergies professionals working together can create.
- Shared decision making gives all team members, including patients/clients, the opportunity to contribute their knowledge and expertise, to arrive collaboratively at an optimal goal.
- A health-care system that supports effective teamwork can improve the quality of patients/clients care, enhance patients/clients safety, and reduce workload issues that cause burnout among professionals.
- To function effectively, interprofessional team members are expected to work collaboratively to formulate, implement and evaluate care and assess, practice and reflect on whether the group processes they have used were effective.
- Competent communication – openness, honesty, respect for each other’s opinions and effective communication skills – is part of all domains of interprofessional practice.
Healthy Work Environment
Developing and Sustaining Interprofessional Health Care: Optimizing patient, organizational and systems outcomes
Background Information