Collaboration among professionals is an essential component of practice. Providing healthcare necessitates constant communication among health team members to improve patient management and address potential complications and issues. This is done to ensure high-quality and comprehensive care while improving patient outcomes. In healthcare, collaboration refers to the effort of working as a team, understanding the function that each individual must play to share the duties to achieve the specified goals successfully. Etherington et al. (2021) highlight that the team will have the opportunity to prioritize tasks and avoid or prevent instances involving mistrust or disrespect of boundaries that may occur concerning professional procedures due to communication. The members’ failure to communicate poses a hurdle to this effort because there needs to be a defined set of objectives to achieve. This paper highlights the barriers and drivers of effective collaboration in interprofessional healthcare teams.
To consistently improve the standard of care given to patients, teamwork is essential in the healthcare or nursing fields of practice. Members know their responsibilities and share them to achieve the group’s objectives. There is mutual respect and trust among the team members when they know how to help one another, whether with their own personal or corporate standards. The members are empowered in this way, which increases their confidence in carrying out their duties and responsibilities (Busari et al., 2017). The aims or priorities of the work will be considerably clearer and understood by everyone, even though they may originate from diverse professional or academic disciplines. Disagreements and other issues are bound to arise due to the constant interaction and collaboration between team members regarding the correct approach to patient management. One of the most common barriers to interprofessional collaboration is determining the patient’s priority problem that must be addressed first and determining which interventions must be prioritized and which are the safest and most effective.
Another barrier that could potentially result in problems is when team members cannot effectively communicate with one another due to various factors, including language barriers or strained interpersonal relationships. Other challenges could result from this particular problem, like the failure to establish prioritized and mutually acceptable goals and objectives, which could lead to even more dysfunction within the health team because there needs to be an obvious direction for their interventions.
The perception of a “hierarchy” among the many professionals on the team is another problem that could arise. Poor leadership and management could result from this, especially if one person is in charge of everything. Due to perceived “superiority/inferiority” complexes between professions, these factors may further polarize health team members even though all of their perspectives are valuable and crucial. Poor interprofessional collaboration can lead to the potential problems mentioned above, which is why it is essential to teach every member of the health team the value of teamwork and professional communication in order to provide safe, effective, and high-quality care and to lessen the burden and responsibility of patient management on a single person , especially in complicated cases. Other barriers include lack of time and training, clear roles, fears relating to professional identity, and poor communication. Principal drivers include tools to improve communication, co-location, and recognition of other professionals’ skills and contributions.
Working with team members from various backgrounds can take time, despite the evident potential benefits of multidisciplinary teams, such as a bigger pool of information and expertise from which the team can draw. Differences in training, professional ideals, problem-solving methods, and comprehension of important issues can all be roadblocks to these teams’ ability to perform at their best. Each team member also contributes their distinct personality, beliefs, and communication preferences, which impact how they work together and, ultimately, their capacity to accomplish common goals. Given the environment in which these teams operate, several difficulties specific to the healthcare industry, such as psychological obstacles, for instance, professional silos, hierarchies, and power disparities, and organizational obstacles, can also impair performance e.g., distributed teams, hybrid working model.
Therefore, it is not surprising that teamwork issues continue to be a major contributor to errors and near-misses in the healthcare industry, with root cause analysis pointing to a lack of efficient teamwork. An awareness of the most typical teamwork issues faced by interdisciplinary teams and how to resolve them is also absent. Members should be trained and informed of the general teamwork skills necessary for successful performance such as communication, shared mental models, mutual respect, and trust to enhance effective collaboration.
There should first be a determination of what motivates or influences performance if collaborative initiatives in healthcare are to be effective. According to Zajac et al., (2021), a comprehensive, evidence-based framework to better understand what supports and obstructs effective multidisciplinary teamwork needs to be improved in the healthcare sector. Despite some differences between collaboration types, the most often reported obstacles and enablers were reported in a variety of scenarios and mostly affected inter- and intra-personal interactions. With the expansion of interprofessional education and the establishment of joint projects and practices at the local level, it is anticipated that the barriers mentioned at the systemic and individual levels would be gradually removed. In conclusion, the above mentioned barriers to interprofessional communication can be minimized or eliminated through enhancing the mentioned drivers towards the same, ensuring effective teamwork among members especially in the health sector.
References
Busari, J., Moll, F., & Duits, A. (2017). Understanding the impact of interprofessional collaboration on the quality of care: A case report from a small-scale resource-limited health care environment. Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare, Volume 10(1), 227–234. NCBI. Web.
Etherington, N., Burns, J. K., Kitto, S., Brehaut, J. C., Britton, M., Singh, S., & Boet, S. (2021). Barriers and enablers to effective interprofessional teamwork in the operating room: A qualitative study using the Theoretical Domains Framework. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0249576. Web.
Zajac, S., Woods, A., Tannenbaum, S., & Salas, E. (2021). Overcoming Challenges to Teamwork in Healthcare: A Team Effectiveness Framework and Evidence-Based Guidance. Frontiers.